ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► Then I regrab it and go "thump thump thump thump thump thump thump."

00:00:02 ◼   ► Anyway, Mac speed should be higher.

00:00:04 ◼   ► All right, as usual we should start with follow-up.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And as usual we have APFS-related follow-up.

00:00:12 ◼   ► How do we have this every week?

00:00:13 ◼   ► I swear to you I'm not like intentionally trying to make this a streak.

00:00:17 ◼   ► It's just happening naturally.

00:00:19 ◼   ► Is this like the Bell Lobby like influencing us?

00:00:22 ◼   ► Like what is going on here?

00:00:23 ◼   ► Who knows, but Liberty RPF from Twitter writes,

00:00:26 ◼   ► "APFS doesn't support compression yet.

00:00:28 ◼   ► "What if on macOS you've run something like clusters

00:00:31 ◼   ► "to compress everything at the file system level?"

00:00:33 ◼   ► What do we make of that, Jon?

00:00:35 ◼   ► - I hadn't thought of this before.

00:00:37 ◼   ► So there are a couple of things about this.

00:00:38 ◼   ► This was a tweet, right?

00:00:40 ◼   ► I also most agree.

00:00:43 ◼   ► My recollection is that ABFS does not support compression,

00:00:46 ◼   ► but I would not, like, am I sure about that?

00:00:49 ◼   ► Maybe not.

00:00:50 ◼   ► Maybe like it actually does have built-in support

00:00:54 ◼   ► for the HFS+ compression and they just never say anything.

00:00:57 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:00:58 ◼   ► assuming it doesn't support compression, which is my recollection at this point.

00:01:02 ◼   ► It is true that on max, even if you never run any third-party utility,

00:01:11 ◼   ► a whole bunch of the files that like come with the operating system and stuff

00:01:14 ◼   ► are compressed on disk, right? And then HLS+ is this native compression feature that I added

00:01:20 ◼   ► many releases ago, and just when it gets read from the file system it gets re-inflated to its normal

00:01:25 ◼   ► size and it's all transparent to the rest of the operating system, it just takes up

00:01:29 ◼   ► less room on disk.

00:01:31 ◼   ► So the APFS conversion thing, iOS anyway, is like, leave all the data exactly where

00:01:35 ◼   ► it is and just make new pointers to it and blah blah blah, don't like moving anything

00:01:38 ◼   ► around.

00:01:39 ◼   ► I have no idea if iOS uses the HFS+ compression feature, but I know Macs do, and also on Mac

00:01:47 ◼   ► there are third-party utilities that can wander over the rest of your file system and compress

00:01:50 ◼   ► stuff or tell HFS+ basically, "Oh, this file right here, make it be compressed on disk

00:01:55 ◼   ► you could write your own little programs to do this, right?

00:01:58 ◼   ► So on a Mac, it is very likely, in fact,

00:02:02 ◼   ► I'm most certain that one or more files are compressed.

00:02:05 ◼   ► Now, if a Mac is going to have the same sort of in-place

00:02:09 ◼   ► conversion to ABFS that iOS devices have,

00:02:12 ◼   ► you have kind of a weird situation where it can't just leave

00:02:15 ◼   ► all the data exactly where it is,

00:02:16 ◼   ► because if ABFS can't decompress stuff,

00:02:18 ◼   ► it can't just leave that data as compressed,

00:02:20 ◼   ► 'cause it'll be scrambled garbage after ABFS points to it

00:02:24 ◼   ► here's the file data and you go to read it and it's compressed garbage. AVS has to either

00:02:28 ◼   ► know how to decompress that on the fly just like HFS Plus, which seems to me to be the easiest

00:02:32 ◼   ► solution because then you don't have to worry about all these issues that I'm about to explain,

00:02:36 ◼   ► or you have to expand those files to their uncompressed version, which means you need

00:02:42 ◼   ► to find space for them, which means you actually have to copy the data someplace else and shuffle

00:02:46 ◼   ► things around and now it becomes suddenly a way more dangerous operation than it was before.

00:02:50 ◼   ► And in the worst case scenario, someone's got tons of stuff compressed with HFS+ compression,

00:02:55 ◼   ► and their disk is almost full, and there's literally no room on the disk to expand everything,

00:02:58 ◼   ► because if you were to expand everything, it would exceed the capacity of the disk.

00:03:01 ◼   ► So I'm hoping that I'm either just misremembering or APFS has support for HFS+ compression just

00:03:10 ◼   ► transparently included and it just hasn't been brought up or they told me and I forgot or

00:03:14 ◼   ► whatever, because that would certainly simplify things. But if that's not the case, it'll be very

00:03:18 ◼   ► interesting to see what happens with the Mac roll out of APFS.

00:03:24 ◼   ► And I wish, maybe someone in the chat room knows, I wish I knew if iOS also uses HRS+

00:03:30 ◼   ► compression, I would imagine it would too, because I don't see any reason it wouldn't

00:03:33 ◼   ► do it, or maybe battery life, I don't know.

00:03:36 ◼   ► The chat room says that iOS does have support.

00:03:39 ◼   ► Support, sure, but like, do all the OS files compress like they are?

00:03:43 ◼   ► Not all of them, but I don't know.

00:03:45 ◼   ► If you get a phone from a store and just take it out of the box, are a bunch of the files

00:03:49 ◼   ► on the formerly HFS+ disk compressed, if you had done this like a year ago?

00:03:54 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:03:55 ◼   ► Anyway, it will be an adventure.

00:03:56 ◼   ► I'm still waiting for the Mac roll-out of APFS, because converting on all our phones

00:04:02 ◼   ► was boring, except for the apps that broke.

00:04:04 ◼   ► Fair enough.

00:04:05 ◼   ► All right, moving on.

00:04:08 ◼   ► We got some very interesting feedback via David Carlton about WWDC launches, which is

00:04:14 ◼   ► topic that keeps on giving.

00:04:15 ◼   ► I love this so much.

00:04:17 ◼   ► He linked us, I actually love it as well, he linked us to the GDC Boss Lady blog by

00:04:23 ◼   ► Megan Scavio.

00:04:26 ◼   ► So she writes, "With regard to the Game Developers Conference, the other recognizable change

00:04:28 ◼   ► this year is lunch.

00:04:29 ◼   ► We reduced the price of conference passes by the cost of lunch.

00:04:33 ◼   ► That boxed lunch that you all know and love and wish you could consume five days a week

00:04:36 ◼   ► all year round is $40 a day," she writes.

00:04:41 ◼   ► "I'll give you a minute to stop choking on your Doritos.

00:04:44 ◼   ► "Ready?

00:04:45 ◼   ► Yes!

00:04:46 ◼   ► $40 a day for sandwich, chips, apple cookie, and water soda.

00:04:49 ◼   ► I could not make this stuff up even if I wanted to.

00:04:51 ◼   ► We decided to give the attendees a choice this year.

00:04:54 ◼   ► Spend as much as you'd like by buying from one of the many on-site concessions or nearby

00:04:57 ◼   ► food repositories or pre-order and pay for the $40 a day meal.

00:05:01 ◼   ► It is now your decision.

00:05:02 ◼   ► I trust you will make the right one."

00:05:03 ◼   ► And the catch here, which I didn't explain, is that GDC apparently, at the time of this

00:05:08 ◼   ► writing, was happening at Moscone.

00:05:10 ◼   ► So holy smokes, $40 a day for that disaster.

00:05:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, this is, the story with conferences

00:05:17 ◼   ► and things like this is, any kind of like exhibitor

00:05:22 ◼   ► of conferences or if you're gonna like set up a booth

00:05:24 ◼   ► at a conference, you've probably gone through

00:05:25 ◼   ► a lot of this crap, basically doing anything inside

00:05:28 ◼   ► of a big conference hall usually involves dealing

00:05:32 ◼   ► with ridiculous exclusive contractors and exclusive vendors

00:05:37 ◼   ► and possible union politics and what you think

00:05:41 ◼   ► these things should cost, they cost way, way,

00:05:45 ◼   ► way more than that.

00:05:46 ◼   ► So this is like, you know, food service exclusive provider

00:05:49 ◼   ► for Moscone provides these lunches,

00:05:52 ◼   ► and Apple pretty much has to pay whatever their price is

00:05:55 ◼   ► because they aren't allowed to bring in food

00:05:58 ◼   ► from anybody else into Moscone.

00:05:59 ◼   ► It's that kind of arrangement usually.

00:06:01 ◼   ► It's like, you know, if you're setting up a booth

00:06:02 ◼   ► for like a small trade show, and you need like a surgical,

00:06:06 ◼   ► you can't bring your own surgical,

00:06:07 ◼   ► you have to use their surgical installed

00:06:09 ◼   ► by one of their licensed people to install it,

00:06:11 ◼   ► and it's gonna cost you $400.

00:06:13 ◼   ► It's that kind of thing usually at these large venues.

00:06:16 ◼   ► So I'm not really surprised to hear this.

00:06:19 ◼   ► It's sad and if you ever book one of these things,

00:06:21 ◼   ► it probably makes you angry, but it's not surprising.

00:06:24 ◼   ► - Even when you're not in a conference center,

00:06:25 ◼   ► like at work we have food they bring in,

00:06:28 ◼   ► they try to bring in healthy food,

00:06:29 ◼   ► so you have apples and bananas and stuff.

00:06:31 ◼   ► And when they first started doing this,

00:06:34 ◼   ► I heard someone throwing around the idea

00:06:36 ◼   ► that each one of those apples was two bucks,

00:06:37 ◼   ► which doesn't seem like too much,

00:06:40 ◼   ► But on the other hand, you just look at the giant pile of apples, you're like, "Oh, that

00:06:43 ◼   ► adds up."

00:06:44 ◼   ► And this is in a non-conference-centered environment.

00:06:46 ◼   ► So in general, just getting large amounts of stuff in a place where it normally wouldn't

00:06:53 ◼   ► appear, whether it's apples in offices or box lunches in a convention center across

00:06:56 ◼   ► a lot of them, yeah.

00:06:57 ◼   ► All the exclusive contracts and the unions makes it really expensive.

00:07:00 ◼   ► And remember this $40 thing, this post was from many years ago, right?

00:07:04 ◼   ► It was like seven years ago?

00:07:05 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:07:06 ◼   ► So it's probably like $100 now.

00:07:08 ◼   ► - So if you do this math, $40 a day times five days of WWDC,

00:07:13 ◼   ► actually I guess it's four 'cause they don't serve,

00:07:14 ◼   ► do they serve lunch on Fridays?

00:07:15 ◼   ► - Yes they do. - Or stay late enough?

00:07:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, they do. - Oh, okay, so five days

00:07:18 ◼   ► times 5,000 attendees, which doesn't account

00:07:21 ◼   ► for all the Apple people, that is a million dollars

00:07:24 ◼   ► on these godforsaken lunches. (laughing)

00:07:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the thing. - Holy cow.

00:07:28 ◼   ► - It's like when you have these kind of like special venues

00:07:31 ◼   ► and special deals with everybody

00:07:32 ◼   ► and restrictions on you doing anything else,

00:07:34 ◼   ► I mean, they can charge kind of whatever they want.

00:07:37 ◼   ► By the way, see also weddings and hospitals.

00:07:39 ◼   ► - Well, it's bad.

00:07:41 ◼   ► Alright, so I think that's it for follow-up, surprisingly.

00:07:43 ◼   ► This is a miracle, I don't know what to make of this.

00:07:45 ◼   ► - Wow.

00:07:46 ◼   ► - I have some alternative topics we could put in follow-up,

00:07:50 ◼   ► Copyright 2011, John Siracusa, but--

00:07:52 ◼   ► - I think you actually did pretty well

00:07:53 ◼   ► defending Plex on Connected.

00:07:56 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, yeah, that was intended for follow-up here,

00:07:59 ◼   ► but I actually did a guest spot on Connected

00:08:03 ◼   ► earlier this week, and we'll put a link in the show notes.

00:08:06 ◼   ► If you don't listen to Connected, our dear friend of the show Federico Vittucci slandered

00:08:10 ◼   ► the Plex name in not the latest episode, but the prior one, and this could not stand.

00:08:17 ◼   ► And as such, I was planning on a probably 15 or 20 minute follow-up section, or really

00:08:22 ◼   ► a follow-out, copyright 2015 or 16, Jason Snell, built upon the work of copyright 2010

00:08:29 ◼   ► John Sirkis.

00:08:30 ◼   ► Anyway, it was a derivative work.

00:08:32 ◼   ► I had planned on doing some follow-out with regard to Connected and their thoughts on

00:08:38 ◼   ► Plex, but I was asked, probably out of desperation because Mike was not in town, I was asked

00:08:44 ◼   ► to guest on the beginning of the latest episode, which I will put a link in the show notes,

00:08:47 ◼   ► like I said.

00:08:48 ◼   ► It's at the very beginning of the episode and I kind of talk about what makes Plex awesome

00:08:52 ◼   ► and why it's not nearly as hard to use as you would expect.

00:08:54 ◼   ► So if you're at all interested in that, I do encourage you to check it out.

00:08:59 ◼   ► But yeah, because of that, our follow-up in this show,

00:09:01 ◼   ► including follow-out, is pretty much done.

00:09:04 ◼   ► - I will say, since we're talking about Plex anyway--

00:09:06 ◼   ► - Oh, here we go, this is how we always get there.

00:09:09 ◼   ► - One quick thing that I don't think you guys

00:09:11 ◼   ► really covered enough that I wanted to point out,

00:09:13 ◼   ► 'cause I was also a Plex skeptic for years.

00:09:18 ◼   ► Casey would always bug me about how great it was

00:09:20 ◼   ► and why don't I do this, and tell me all the great things

00:09:23 ◼   ► that, well, you know, if you had Plex,

00:09:24 ◼   ► you wouldn't have this problem right now.

00:09:26 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:09:27 ◼   ► And one of the great values to me of Plex,

00:09:30 ◼   ► in a world where we can stream pretty much everything

00:09:33 ◼   ► we want all the time, and that is when you have children,

00:09:38 ◼   ► and the children really want to watch a specific thing

00:09:42 ◼   ► at a certain time, that they do that every day.

00:09:45 ◼   ► And if this thing is not available for kids,

00:09:48 ◼   ► it's going to cause problems for the parents.

00:09:50 ◼   ► And there's lots of times in life to teach your kids

00:09:53 ◼   ► they can't always get what they want.

00:09:56 ◼   ► But a lot of times you don't wanna have

00:09:57 ◼   ► that discussion right now.

00:09:58 ◼   ► You just want to give the kid the TV show

00:10:01 ◼   ► they wanted to watch so you can go wash the dishes

00:10:03 ◼   ► or something.

00:10:04 ◼   ► And sometimes internet connections go down.

00:10:08 ◼   ► Sometimes iTunes freaks out and won't authorize anything.

00:10:12 ◼   ► Sometimes things break in the online world.

00:10:15 ◼   ► And it is really, really nice when that happens,

00:10:17 ◼   ► which is rare, but when that does happen,

00:10:20 ◼   ► it's really nice to have Plex running in your home

00:10:24 ◼   ► And everything you need to play the media you wanna play

00:10:27 ◼   ► is on your local network and DRM free.

00:10:30 ◼   ► And that means there is no reliance

00:10:32 ◼   ► on your Fios being out or not out.

00:10:35 ◼   ► There's no reliance on the Apple DRM servers

00:10:38 ◼   ► authorizing you to watch what you paid for or not.

00:10:41 ◼   ► It's just playing a file off a network share

00:10:44 ◼   ► and it just works.

00:10:45 ◼   ► And that's really, really nice when you need it.

00:10:48 ◼   ► - Yep, and if you have friends

00:10:50 ◼   ► which also have Plex servers and accounts and whatnot,

00:10:54 ◼   ► you can stream from each other.

00:10:56 ◼   ► So I have been amassing a collection of Daniel Tiger

00:11:00 ◼   ► and Paw Patrol and things of that nature.

00:11:02 ◼   ► And so these are probably beneath Adam at this point,

00:11:04 ◼   ► but hypothetically, if Adam wanted Paw Patrol

00:11:08 ◼   ► and it isn't on Netflix or iTunes is down

00:11:11 ◼   ► or whatever the case may be,

00:11:12 ◼   ► Marco can hop on Plex, tell Plex,

00:11:15 ◼   ► don't look at my local server, look at Casey server,

00:11:18 ◼   ► and he can stream that directly from me to him,

00:11:21 ◼   ► which is really awesome.

00:11:22 ◼   ► And so once you've built up a kind of quote unquote network

00:11:26 ◼   ► of a few friends that all have media,

00:11:29 ◼   ► it's actually kind of your own personal Netflix.

00:11:32 ◼   ► It's really phenomenal and really, really cool.

00:11:34 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by Fracture.

00:11:38 ◼   ► Go to fractureme.com/podcast and select ATP there

00:11:43 ◼   ► so they know you came from here.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Fracture is a photo decor company.

00:11:47 ◼   ► They're out to rescue your favorite images

00:11:49 ◼   ► from the digital ether, and here's how they do that.

00:11:51 ◼   ► They print beautiful photo prints in vivid color

00:11:55 ◼   ► onto sheets of glass that hang on your wall

00:11:58 ◼   ► or stand up on your desk.

00:11:59 ◼   ► It is really just, they print your photos

00:12:02 ◼   ► on these nice thin panes of glass,

00:12:05 ◼   ► and you just hang that on your wall,

00:12:07 ◼   ► and the photos go edge to edge.

00:12:08 ◼   ► There's no frame needed, even.

00:12:11 ◼   ► The photos are their own standalone objects

00:12:14 ◼   ► that go edge to edge with the print,

00:12:16 ◼   ► and it looks so clean and modern

00:12:19 ◼   ► to just have the photo across the whole expanse.

00:12:22 ◼   ► They make great gifts as well.

00:12:24 ◼   ► Mother's Day is right around the corner.

00:12:26 ◼   ► Suppose you have kids and you wanna get pictures

00:12:29 ◼   ► of your kids for your mother

00:12:31 ◼   ► or for maybe their grandmother.

00:12:33 ◼   ► It's a great gift idea for all sorts of occasions,

00:12:35 ◼   ► friends, family.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And these things just look great around the house.

00:12:39 ◼   ► We have them all over our house

00:12:41 ◼   ► and we get compliments every time somebody comes over

00:12:44 ◼   ► and say, "Hey, what's that?

00:12:45 ◼   ► Is that a fracture if they heard of it?

00:12:46 ◼   ► Like, they just look fantastic, these great photo prints.

00:12:50 ◼   ► And they really want you to get those photos

00:12:52 ◼   ► out of the social media feeds that they kinda get stuck in.

00:12:55 ◼   ► Because if you, you know, you post a great picture

00:12:57 ◼   ► to Facebook or Instagram or whatever,

00:12:59 ◼   ► and then in eight hours it's gone.

00:13:01 ◼   ► You'll like never see it again,

00:13:02 ◼   ► 'cause it's off the end of the timeline.

00:13:04 ◼   ► Get those best photos out, get them printed by Fracture.

00:13:07 ◼   ► It looks great, they look great either in your house

00:13:09 ◼   ► or in somebody else's as a gift.

00:13:11 ◼   ► Go to fractureme.com/podcast and then there's a little picker to say what show you came

00:13:17 ◼   ► from.

00:13:18 ◼   ► Make sure you pick ATP on that list so that we get credit and they know that you came

00:13:21 ◼   ► from here.

00:13:22 ◼   ► And I highly recommend you check out Fracture.

00:13:25 ◼   ► Great photo prints directly on glass.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Great prices and great gifts too.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Fractureme.com/podcast.

00:13:30 ◼   ► Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show.

00:13:37 ◼   ► We also have some show news.

00:13:39 ◼   ► We do.

00:13:40 ◼   ► much do. This is super exciting. I'm very pumped about this. Tell us what's going

00:13:44 ◼   ► on Marco. All right so we are doing a live show at WWDC. So on Monday June 5th

00:13:51 ◼   ► in WWDC week we are doing a live show at AltConf. AltConf is this community run

00:13:58 ◼   ► conference that happens like across or down the street from WWDC. It's happened

00:14:03 ◼   ► for three or four years now at least right? It's been kind of a while.

00:14:05 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:14:06 ◼   ► - And the way Alconf works is the conference

00:14:09 ◼   ► is totally community run and it's free for the most part.

00:14:13 ◼   ► You can pay optionally if you want to

00:14:17 ◼   ► to get priority in line, but otherwise it's free

00:14:21 ◼   ► and there's great diverse talks

00:14:24 ◼   ► and it's really a great event for the community.

00:14:26 ◼   ► Anyway, we wanted to do a live show this year

00:14:29 ◼   ► and they had this great thing where they invite

00:14:32 ◼   ► the community to come use their venue

00:14:36 ◼   ► and bring talks and content to AltConf.

00:14:39 ◼   ► We decided to take them up on that offer

00:14:40 ◼   ► and we contacted them this past week

00:14:42 ◼   ► and arranged it pretty quickly actually.

00:14:44 ◼   ► So we are doing a live show in AltConf

00:14:48 ◼   ► and it's gonna be separately ticketed,

00:14:51 ◼   ► mostly for the purposes of just capacity management,

00:14:55 ◼   ► but the tickets are just five bucks.

00:14:56 ◼   ► It's basically just to make sure that people

00:14:59 ◼   ► actually are serious when they book them

00:15:00 ◼   ► so we know how many people are coming,

00:15:02 ◼   ► so we know how big to make the room.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And then we're working on maybe we can donate that money

00:15:06 ◼   ► to something useful.

00:15:07 ◼   ► And then the show is gonna be Monday from five to seven p.m.

00:15:11 ◼   ► So the idea here is to be after the WBC

00:15:15 ◼   ► State of the Union Address,

00:15:16 ◼   ► which usually runs until four or four thirty.

00:15:18 ◼   ► But before anybody's dinner plans

00:15:20 ◼   ► or Jim Dalrymple's beard bash

00:15:23 ◼   ► or other things that might be happening on Monday night.

00:15:25 ◼   ► So five to seven p.m. live show,

00:15:28 ◼   ► WBC Monday, June 5th at Alt Conf.

00:15:31 ◼   ► go to, is it altconf.com?

00:15:33 ◼   ► It is altconf.com, okay, just checking.

00:15:37 ◼   ► And yeah, so we look forward to it.

00:15:40 ◼   ► It's gonna be, you know, it's not gonna be

00:15:42 ◼   ► like any kind of outrageous thing

00:15:43 ◼   ► where we have like Tim Cook on or anything.

00:15:44 ◼   ► I don't, I mean, we could try,

00:15:46 ◼   ► but I don't think we'll get him.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Just a hunch.

00:15:49 ◼   ► But I'm looking forward to it.

00:15:51 ◼   ► We're gonna just, you know, we're gonna basically

00:15:53 ◼   ► just do this in front of a live audience

00:15:54 ◼   ► of between 100 and 1,000 people,

00:15:57 ◼   ► depending on how many people respond to the room.

00:16:01 ◼   ► I do expect to stream it live.

00:16:03 ◼   ► - When you say that, you mean audio only

00:16:07 ◼   ► is your expectation.

00:16:08 ◼   ► - Yes, I don't think we have any kind of video setup.

00:16:11 ◼   ► I do have the audio setup to stream it live

00:16:15 ◼   ► if internet connectivity holds out.

00:16:17 ◼   ► And that's a huge if at conference,

00:16:19 ◼   ► so I don't want to guarantee it.

00:16:20 ◼   ► Because basically I will be trying to get

00:16:23 ◼   ► some kind of connection out of a very, very full room

00:16:26 ◼   ► in a venue I've never been in,

00:16:28 ◼   ► in a city I've never been in.

00:16:29 ◼   ► So it's hard to predict whether or not

00:16:32 ◼   ► I will be able to maintain an audio live stream,

00:16:34 ◼   ► but I'll do my best.

00:16:35 ◼   ► Otherwise, we look forward to it.

00:16:37 ◼   ► So yeah, if you wanna come, go book a ticket now.

00:16:40 ◼   ► We will put the link in the show notes.

00:16:42 ◼   ► And so yeah, thanks to Alt-Conf for working with us on this,

00:16:45 ◼   ► 'cause what we wanted to really was just like,

00:16:48 ◼   ► we wanted to do a live show,

00:16:50 ◼   ► but we didn't wanna go through the massive ordeal

00:16:53 ◼   ► and hassle and risk of booking a whole venue ourselves.

00:16:57 ◼   ► It's a ton of work to do that,

00:16:59 ◼   ► and I highly respect the podcasts that do that.

00:17:01 ◼   ► We did not have that in us,

00:17:03 ◼   ► and we could barely get t-shirts for sale.

00:17:05 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:17:06 ◼   ► So we found a great arrangement with AltConf

00:17:09 ◼   ► that worked out well for all of us,

00:17:11 ◼   ► and we hope to see you there.

00:17:13 ◼   ► - Yep, it's super exciting.

00:17:15 ◼   ► Most of the three of us are very excited about it,

00:17:19 ◼   ► so please, if you are interested at all in doing this,

00:17:22 ◼   ► you think you will be there, please go ahead and get yourself a ticket, buy a ticket, and

00:17:27 ◼   ► do it now, just like the t-shirts.

00:17:29 ◼   ► To be clear, the live show that we're doing, like, it's a live show, you can come see us

00:17:33 ◼   ► live, we're gonna try to stream it, and the main thing that will probably prevent streaming

00:17:37 ◼   ► is the fact that if the stream craps out, Marco can't fix it because he's on stage,

00:17:41 ◼   ► so oh well.

00:17:42 ◼   ► But we're also releasing it as a regular episode.

00:17:44 ◼   ► This will be our regular WWDC episode.

00:17:46 ◼   ► Oh yeah, good point.

00:17:47 ◼   ► In most years, like, we just record this in Marco's hotel room or whatever, you know,

00:17:51 ◼   ► We're releasing this episode, so don't feel like, "Oh, I'm not going to the WFC, I'll

00:17:54 ◼   ► miss this one."

00:17:55 ◼   ► You won't miss it.

00:17:56 ◼   ► It will be that week's episode.

00:17:57 ◼   ► You just won't get to see it or hear it live.

00:17:59 ◼   ► That's it.

00:18:00 ◼   ► Excellent point.

00:18:01 ◼   ► So the news this week, it's been a little while since we've spoken to each other.

00:18:05 ◼   ► I've missed you too deeply.

00:18:06 ◼   ► But one thing I might be missing soon is Touch ID in the front of my phone, because there

00:18:11 ◼   ► have been some very interesting hardware specs and photographs that have leaked that indicate

00:18:18 ◼   ► the Touch ID sensor in the supposed iPhone 8 may be on the back of the phone under the

00:18:26 ◼   ► Apple logo.

00:18:28 ◼   ► And the internet is not happy about this, from what I can tell.

00:18:35 ◼   ► I don't really know what I make of it yet.

00:18:37 ◼   ► I've never really used a phone with the fingerprint sensor on the back.

00:18:42 ◼   ► However, pretty much anyone that I know that has used an Android phone with any regularity

00:18:47 ◼   ► has said that, "Eh, it's fine." In fact, some of them have even said they prefer it, even

00:18:52 ◼   ► having had used both. So I'm kind of whatever about this. It's not something I feel like I want,

00:19:00 ◼   ► but I think I can roll with it just fine. You know, I feel the same way about this as I did

00:19:05 ◼   ► about the lock button moving from the top to the right-hand side of the phone.

00:19:09 ◼   ► Not really something I want. I'm sure I'll get over it, and that's exactly how it turned out.

00:19:14 ◼   ► not really something I wanted, I got over it pretty quick.

00:19:17 ◼   ► So Marco, how do you feel about this?

00:19:19 ◼   ► - I'm kind of the same way.

00:19:20 ◼   ► I've never used a phone with it on the back,

00:19:22 ◼   ► and I think I'd get used to it, it would be fine,

00:19:25 ◼   ► but I think on the front would be better.

00:19:27 ◼   ► And I think it's more interesting

00:19:29 ◼   ► that we don't seem to have a clear picture yet,

00:19:32 ◼   ► and that maybe Apple doesn't seem

00:19:34 ◼   ► to have a clear picture yet.

00:19:35 ◼   ► That is more interesting,

00:19:36 ◼   ► 'cause it's getting pretty late in the year

00:19:38 ◼   ► for these kind of decisions to not be made yet.

00:19:41 ◼   ► - I got a point of clarification

00:19:43 ◼   ► that we needed on this because in the beginning,

00:19:45 ◼   ► Casey said the Touch ID sensor is on the back

00:19:48 ◼   ► under the Apple logo, and that actually

00:19:50 ◼   ► can be interpreted in multiple ways,

00:19:52 ◼   ► one of which is a way that has been suggested.

00:19:54 ◼   ► So what he was referring to is that you'll look at the link

00:19:58 ◼   ► we'll put in the show notes, the 9to5Mac or whatever,

00:20:00 ◼   ► that shows a picture of the supposed part leak.

00:20:02 ◼   ► So if you look at the back of an iPhone,

00:20:04 ◼   ► there's an Apple logo on the back,

00:20:05 ◼   ► but the Apple logo is towards the top of the phone, right?

00:20:08 ◼   ► When he says under the Apple logo,

00:20:10 ◼   ► he means go down about an inch from that and pretty much dead center in the back of the

00:20:15 ◼   ► phone below the Apple logo, like lower down on the phone than the Apple logo, there's

00:20:20 ◼   ► a circular opening and that's where Touch ID would be.

00:20:22 ◼   ► A lot of people suggested, "Hey, if you're going to put something on the back of the

00:20:25 ◼   ► phone, why don't you make the Apple logo also the Touch ID sensor?"

00:20:30 ◼   ► Obviously the problems there are that it's not really shaped like a circle and it might

00:20:34 ◼   ► be hard to get a sensor that kind of fills that area and still looks nice and blah, blah,

00:20:38 ◼   ► blah.

00:20:39 ◼   ► position wrong, maybe you actually do want it more towards the center instead of high

00:20:42 ◼   ► up and so it's all sorts of aesthetic and functional decisions that may make them not

00:20:46 ◼   ► want to put the Touch ID sensor literally in the Apple logo. But the parts leaks show

00:20:51 ◼   ► there's a cutout for the Apple logo and then an inch lower there's a circular cutout for

00:20:55 ◼   ► the Touch ID sensor.

00:20:56 ◼   ► So what are your thoughts on this, Jon?

00:20:58 ◼   ► Well, I mean, these parts leaks, we're getting into parts leak season and I have a hard time

00:21:08 ◼   ► dismissing these as complete fakes or ridiculous things because they're starting to look

00:21:13 ◼   ► Starting to look pretty real to me at the very least a real thing that was made by somebody for some purpose probably Apple

00:21:21 ◼   ► Some people in the chat room are saying there's no way Apple will do this

00:21:27 ◼   ► They'll never do this because it's not an Apple thing to do

00:21:29 ◼   ► I totally disagree with that Apple would 100% do this whether they are going to do it or not

00:21:34 ◼   ► I guess you know as every week advances these things these rumors be the cement or they will just go away

00:21:40 ◼   ► We won't see it anymore

00:21:41 ◼   ► But remember this is the phone we're talking about that's supposed to get rid of the chin and forehead

00:21:45 ◼   ► More or less and make the screen go from top to bottom edge to edge much more so than it does now

00:21:50 ◼   ► Leaving no room for even the completely immobile touch ID button on the iPhone 7 there won't even be room for a non moving button

00:21:57 ◼   ► I'll just be screen everywhere and so you know the earlier rumors were like oh, it'll be screen everywhere

00:22:02 ◼   ► and in fact the home button and touch ID will also be in the screen. You can kind of see how they could put the home button

00:22:09 ◼   ► in the screen because we already have a home button that doesn't move, right?

00:22:11 ◼   ► And there's a little indentation for it, which is better than being no indentation.

00:22:15 ◼   ► And that's another sort of ergonomic issue of like, "How do I find the home button if there's no little indentation for my thumb to go in?"

00:22:19 ◼   ► I just feel for the middle of the phone or maybe the whole bottom of the phone is like a home button and I just

00:22:24 ◼   ► force press somewhere near the bottom and it takes me home, whatever. But the touch ID sensor,

00:22:30 ◼   ► The the rumors were supposed to like oh it turned out to be harder than they thought

00:22:34 ◼   ► To get a touch ID sensor inside a screen because the screen has lights that come out of it in the touch ID sensor

00:22:40 ◼   ► You know, it's like sensor and screen are not the same things

00:22:42 ◼   ► How do they combine them in a way that the touch ID sensor works and all these recent part leaks are part of the narrative?

00:22:48 ◼   ► They're like, oh they couldn't get that to work this year. So instead they're putting it on the back

00:22:52 ◼   ► and

00:22:54 ◼   ► You know people have Android phones with touch ID sensors on the back and they're saying like it's fine

00:22:58 ◼   ► It's whatever like obviously if you put your phone down on the table now, you can't unlock it

00:23:02 ◼   ► Unless you put it face down, but then when you unlock it, it's no good because you can't see the screen anyway, right?

00:23:06 ◼   ► You know, so that's the one

00:23:08 ◼   ► Disadvantage that people talk about with it being on the back. But otherwise like ergonomically speaking

00:23:13 ◼   ► It's probably better easier to hit the touch ID on the back than it is to hit touch ID

00:23:20 ◼   ► That's the very very edge of your phone

00:23:22 ◼   ► You know what?

00:23:23 ◼   ► I mean, like it's like if you had to pick where is the best place to put a fingerprint sensor on on?

00:23:28 ◼   ► on a featureless rectangle, you wouldn't say,

00:23:30 ◼   ► "Let me put it on the very, very bottom edge,"

00:23:32 ◼   ► 'cause you kinda gotta shimmy your hand down

00:23:34 ◼   ► and you kinda pinch it from the edge.

00:23:36 ◼   ► You could certainly get a more secure grip

00:23:38 ◼   ► if the touch of the sensor were somewhere in the middle.

00:23:41 ◼   ► My main reservation about the thing being in the middle

00:23:46 ◼   ► is since I'm someone who's had a case

00:23:49 ◼   ► on all of my iOS devices,

00:23:50 ◼   ► putting something that you can't put a case over on the back

00:23:56 ◼   ► is somewhat of a problem/disappointment for me.

00:24:01 ◼   ► I am not one of those people that has ever had a case

00:24:04 ◼   ► that has like a circle cut out,

00:24:05 ◼   ► so you can see the Apple logo.

00:24:06 ◼   ► I found those cases absurd and just comical and sad.

00:24:10 ◼   ► I don't need a cut out to show the world of my Apple logo.

00:24:14 ◼   ► And in fact, if you get an Apple case,

00:24:15 ◼   ► they have their own Apple logo on the case

00:24:17 ◼   ► as a little indentation.

00:24:18 ◼   ► People will still know it's an iPhone.

00:24:19 ◼   ► It'll be fine, I swear.

00:24:21 ◼   ► But not just for those sort of aesthetic

00:24:24 ◼   ► like image reasons I don't like the cutout but mainly I don't like the cutout because

00:24:30 ◼   ► the cutout that will inevitably have to be there on any case for an Apple iPhone with

00:24:36 ◼   ► the touch ID sensor on the back is that that basically becomes a lint collecting belly

00:24:41 ◼   ► button for your phone.

00:24:42 ◼   ► Like it's another place for grime and crap to get inside there because you're going to

00:24:47 ◼   ► be sticking your grimy fingers in there constantly to unlock your phone and any grime that's

00:24:51 ◼   ► on there is just gonna get wedged into this little thing. It will literally be a grimy,

00:24:55 ◼   ► linty belly button for your phone. That's not good. It doesn't look good. It doesn't feel good.

00:25:00 ◼   ► It makes the Touch ID sensor farther away from you because now you gotta dig your finger into

00:25:03 ◼   ► the little belly button to find the Touch ID sensor. The thicker your case is, the worse

00:25:07 ◼   ► that's gonna be. Think of battery cases. How the hell are you gonna get a battery case? It's gonna

00:25:11 ◼   ► be a super-duper innie belly button where you gotta poke your finger up there and it's gonna be

00:25:16 ◼   ► a mess. If you don't use cases on your phone, whatever, then it's no big deal, right? These

00:25:21 ◼   ► these are all non-issues, but I do use cases,

00:25:23 ◼   ► and I don't want to stick my finger

00:25:25 ◼   ► into a little hole in the case,

00:25:26 ◼   ► and fiddle around on a linty belly button.

00:25:29 ◼   ► So that's mostly making me either,

00:25:31 ◼   ► A, hope this is not true, or B, hope that by the time,

00:25:35 ◼   ► 'cause I have a 7, I'm not gonna get this phone,

00:25:36 ◼   ► I'm gonna wait another year and get the one after that.

00:25:38 ◼   ► Hopefully, by the next phone,

00:25:40 ◼   ► they will have started out whatever issues

00:25:42 ◼   ► with Touch ID on the front,

00:25:43 ◼   ► and I don't want to worry about this.

00:25:46 ◼   ► - I think having it on the back is worse enough

00:25:49 ◼   ► than having it on the front,

00:25:50 ◼   ► that if we were forced to,

00:25:53 ◼   ► if there was no way to keep it on the front

00:25:55 ◼   ► while having the screen go edge to edge,

00:25:57 ◼   ► like if there was no way to put it under the screen,

00:25:59 ◼   ► I would rather just still have the chin.

00:26:01 ◼   ► Like, you know, make the bezel smaller.

00:26:03 ◼   ► You don't need to make the screen two to one.

00:26:06 ◼   ► You can keep it being 16 by nine

00:26:07 ◼   ► and not do like the Samsung 18 by nine or two to one thing

00:26:11 ◼   ► 'cause no one really needs it to be taller, necessarily.

00:26:14 ◼   ► Just keep the chin.

00:26:18 ◼   ► Like, I don't think we need,

00:26:19 ◼   ► No one's really asking to have that go away

00:26:23 ◼   ► if the cost is gonna be losing Touch ID to the back.

00:26:27 ◼   ► - Well, Johnny, I like symmetry.

00:26:28 ◼   ► I mean, I know you've got a chin on the iMac

00:26:30 ◼   ► and no forehead, right?

00:26:31 ◼   ► But on the phone, though,

00:26:32 ◼   ► I feel like that silhouette is so iconic,

00:26:34 ◼   ► you know, of the, like, even, like,

00:26:35 ◼   ► Apple's little outline graphics that they give you

00:26:38 ◼   ► for iPhone that you're not allowed to use in your app

00:26:39 ◼   ► or they won't let it in the App Store.

00:26:41 ◼   ► That it's basically a rounded rectangle

00:26:42 ◼   ► with a little rectangle exactly dead center in the middle,

00:26:44 ◼   ► and that's basically, you know, hieroglyphics for iPhone

00:26:48 ◼   ► or for smartphone at this point,

00:26:50 ◼   ► for Apple to come out with an iPhone

00:26:53 ◼   ► with asymmetrical margins, like a chin,

00:26:56 ◼   ► but very little forehead,

00:26:57 ◼   ► because they're trying to pull on the edges.

00:26:59 ◼   ► Like you can pull on the sides a little bit

00:27:01 ◼   ► and shave a few millimeters, right?

00:27:02 ◼   ► Oh, edge to edge screen,

00:27:03 ◼   ► especially if they do like a rounded screen on the edges,

00:27:05 ◼   ► like so many of the past Android phones.

00:27:08 ◼   ► - Oh, it's a lot.

00:27:09 ◼   ► Like when you see them side by side

00:27:11 ◼   ► in people's review videos,

00:27:12 ◼   ► like the iPhone design, the side bezels really stick out

00:27:17 ◼   ► compared to these newer bezel-less ones like the S8.

00:27:21 ◼   ► - Yeah, but it's only a few millimeters here.

00:27:22 ◼   ► It's not like you're getting back a full inch

00:27:25 ◼   ► if you took off the chin and forehead.

00:27:26 ◼   ► - But that matters.

00:27:27 ◼   ► I'm saying if you keep most of the chin,

00:27:31 ◼   ► you don't even need to keep the whole chin,

00:27:33 ◼   ► just keep enough of it for a Touch ID sensor to be there.

00:27:36 ◼   ► - There's like two millimeters on top and bottom

00:27:38 ◼   ► of the Touch ID sensor.

00:27:39 ◼   ► Go look at your phone right now.

00:27:40 ◼   ► There's not a lot of room above and below.

00:27:42 ◼   ► - I'm holding it right now.

00:27:43 ◼   ► There is some room, about as much room as the side bezels,

00:27:46 ◼   ► And also, does it need to be that big?

00:27:49 ◼   ► We don't know.

00:27:49 ◼   ► Maybe they can get away with a smaller one.

00:27:51 ◼   ► - I think it needs to be that big.

00:27:53 ◼   ► - Well, but regardless, like I'm saying,

00:27:55 ◼   ► you know, this is all about trade-offs, right?

00:27:57 ◼   ► This has been like a theme of our show,

00:27:59 ◼   ► is like is Apple making the right trade-offs

00:28:00 ◼   ► in its physical designs of things?

00:28:02 ◼   ► And I think the trade-off here is like,

00:28:06 ◼   ► Touch ID on the back is not that great.

00:28:09 ◼   ► And if you keep it on the front,

00:28:11 ◼   ► basically like, you know, it solves a lot of problems.

00:28:13 ◼   ► If you can't get it under the screen,

00:28:15 ◼   ► which, I mean, I don't know a lot about screen technology,

00:28:18 ◼   ► but getting it under a screen without having it be

00:28:20 ◼   ► like a visible different spot on the screen

00:28:23 ◼   ► when the screen's showing an image, sounds impossible.

00:28:25 ◼   ► That sounds really, really hard.

00:28:27 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not impossible.

00:28:29 ◼   ► I feel like, you know, I feel like the rumor

00:28:32 ◼   ► wouldn't have been around so long

00:28:33 ◼   ► if it was literally impossible.

00:28:34 ◼   ► I think the tech is sorta kinda there

00:28:36 ◼   ► to sorta kinda pull this off to some degree.

00:28:39 ◼   ► - But you think-- - Otherwise,

00:28:40 ◼   ► it would never be discussed.

00:28:41 ◼   ► - But you think that like, that there's a way

00:28:43 ◼   ► to put some kind of optical readings or scanning sensor

00:28:48 ◼   ► in a screen that also is showing pixels

00:28:51 ◼   ► such that if you showed a solid color rectangle

00:28:55 ◼   ► on the screen that you wouldn't see the outline of that?

00:28:58 ◼   ► - Touch ID isn't optical, is it?

00:29:00 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:29:01 ◼   ► - Oh, I don't know.

00:29:02 ◼   ► If I knew how Touch ID worked,

00:29:03 ◼   ► I could have a more informed opinion about this,

00:29:05 ◼   ► but I don't.

00:29:06 ◼   ► But anyway, the rumor's been around so long

00:29:10 ◼   ► And I haven't seen a single story that say,

00:29:12 ◼   ► "You dummy, that's impossible.

00:29:15 ◼   ► "Stop talking about this."

00:29:16 ◼   ► Which leads me to believe that it is possible.

00:29:18 ◼   ► It's just a question of how much worse is the sensor?

00:29:20 ◼   ► How less clear an image

00:29:24 ◼   ► or a sense of your fingerprints does it get?

00:29:26 ◼   ► So I feel like it's possible,

00:29:32 ◼   ► if not now, then eventually,

00:29:33 ◼   ► but if not this year, then whatever.

00:29:36 ◼   ► But getting back to the idea of leaving the chin

00:29:38 ◼   ► getting rid of the forehead, like you know, you can pull in the margins all you want.

00:29:42 ◼   ► Bottom line is, if the margin above is not the width of the margin below, you've got

00:29:46 ◼   ► an asymmetrical phone.

00:29:47 ◼   ► That's weird to me.

00:29:48 ◼   ► Now they did make the Fat Nano, so never say never, right?

00:29:50 ◼   ► Apple has been known to make some pretty awkward looking iOS.

00:29:54 ◼   ► That wasn't iOS device.

00:29:55 ◼   ► Awkward looking handheld battery powered devices.

00:29:58 ◼   ► So who knows what they'll do.

00:30:01 ◼   ► But I personally think that would be an ugly iPhone.

00:30:04 ◼   ► It would be the equivalent of the Fat Nano, even more so than the thing on the back.

00:30:08 ◼   ► And so I think it is more likely that the front will be nice and symmetrical and the

00:30:13 ◼   ► Touch ID sensor will be on the back if they really couldn't get it any other way.

00:30:16 ◼   ► Or like the final thing is, it's got top and bottom margins that are both equal, they're

00:30:20 ◼   ► both slightly smaller than they were before, they pulled in the sides a little bit, and

00:30:24 ◼   ► you know, there's your phone.

00:30:25 ◼   ► People would still like that, it would be a new form factor, it's not like the iPhone

00:30:28 ◼   ► 7 form factor again, it is a new phone especially that has that steel shiny chrome edge thing

00:30:34 ◼   ► sort of reminiscent of the first iPhone and the stainless steel back and you know all

00:30:39 ◼   ► the other thing it would be a new form factor people would accept it as a new phone it just

00:30:42 ◼   ► wouldn't be like oh I thought this one was only gonna have screen on the front but instead

00:30:46 ◼   ► it's still got a chin and a forehead but oh well.

00:30:49 ◼   ► Yeah I agree I certainly would not complain if Touch ID was pretty much exactly the way

00:30:55 ◼   ► it was it's just the only difference is that the bezels were slightly smaller but we'll

00:31:00 ◼   ► We'll see.

00:31:01 ◼   ► I'm pretty much nonplussed by this regardless.

00:31:04 ◼   ► Whatever ends up happening happens and that's fine.

00:31:06 ◼   ► Oh, by the way, I think this is a good time to revisit while we're on the topic of the

00:31:12 ◼   ► buttons on our phones and everything, to take another pass at each of us saying how we feel

00:31:19 ◼   ► about the nonmoving iPhone 7 home button after using it for what, a year now or whatever

00:31:24 ◼   ► it's been.

00:31:25 ◼   ► Mm-hmm.

00:31:26 ◼   ► Because I had occasion to use my wife's phone recently and she's got a 6s and that button

00:31:30 ◼   ► moves and I start off as like, "Oh, the buttons, it's weird. You get used to it. It's not quite

00:31:36 ◼   ► the same or whatever." And now I'm at the point where when I use an iOS device where

00:31:40 ◼   ► the button actually moves, it feels like junk and I can't handle it and I am like fully

00:31:44 ◼   ► converted. I am fully converted to the non-moving button, which does not feel like the old button.

00:31:50 ◼   ► It's not like, "Oh, now it has fooled me." It doesn't. But what I'm saying is the way

00:31:53 ◼   ► it feels now is the way I expect my phone to feel. The little wiggly shake, even how

00:31:57 ◼   ► it works when my phone is sitting on a tabletop like all those little haptic movements and

00:32:03 ◼   ► whatever my hands have just accepted that that's how your phone feels and when I use

00:32:07 ◼   ► phones that don't feel that way and when a thing like presses in on them it feels junky

00:32:11 ◼   ► and crappy to me so I am a total convert to this which makes me gives me some hope that

00:32:16 ◼   ► I will eventually be a convert to and you know an in-screen completely smooth no border

00:32:22 ◼   ► thing I could be wrong it could be that I need the little circle to deal with my thumb

00:32:25 ◼   ► right, no matter where it is,

00:32:26 ◼   ► which is another question by the way,

00:32:27 ◼   ► if they put Touch ID in the back,

00:32:28 ◼   ► is it a little crater on the back

00:32:29 ◼   ► or is it totally featureless?

00:32:31 ◼   ► And if it is a crater, that's kind of weird

00:32:32 ◼   ► 'cause you'd have the Apple logo

00:32:33 ◼   ► and then a little zit crater belly button blow it.

00:32:36 ◼   ► Anyway, I'm here to say that I feel like I have,

00:32:41 ◼   ► unbeknownst to me, completely converted

00:32:44 ◼   ► to not just tolerating the non-moving home button,

00:32:46 ◼   ► but to saying I like the non-moving home button

00:32:49 ◼   ► better than all of the moving home buttons I've ever used.

00:32:52 ◼   ► - I could not possibly agree with you more.

00:32:54 ◼   ► The only time I dislike the non-moving home button, the static home button, is when I

00:33:00 ◼   ► try to unlock my phone when it's resting on a table, because whatever magic the haptic,

00:33:05 ◼   ► taptic, whatever feedback does in order to make you feel like you've clicked a button,

00:33:09 ◼   ► it's either completely muted to the point of, figuratively speaking, silence, or just

00:33:15 ◼   ► very, very, very soft and almost muted. And that annoys me, but in hand, I have no problem with it.

00:33:24 ◼   ► and I believe I'm on the softest setting.

00:33:26 ◼   ► I'm gonna have to come back to it

00:33:28 ◼   ► 'cause I don't remember offhand,

00:33:29 ◼   ► but I think I'm on the softest feedback setting too.

00:33:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, like I mentioned the table thing,

00:33:34 ◼   ► it may be because I have a case,

00:33:35 ◼   ► like it does feel different when it's on the table,

00:33:38 ◼   ► but I have now come to like that feeling also better

00:33:41 ◼   ► than pressing like the home button on my wife's 6S

00:33:44 ◼   ► that's also sitting on the table.

00:33:45 ◼   ► It is totally weird and it is different

00:33:46 ◼   ► than when it's in your hand,

00:33:48 ◼   ► but I like it better because it's just what I'm used to,

00:33:50 ◼   ► right, and when I press it and it moves in,

00:33:52 ◼   ► it feels like I'm breaking the phone

00:33:53 ◼   ► and opening up this weird gap and like,

00:33:56 ◼   ► it feels so clunky or whatever.

00:33:58 ◼   ► And I have been in a situation,

00:34:00 ◼   ► and maybe it is the case that it makes a difference

00:34:02 ◼   ► that like gives it that extra cushion or margin

00:34:04 ◼   ► for the haptics to do something,

00:34:06 ◼   ► like where you press it and like,

00:34:08 ◼   ► imagine if you pressed it

00:34:09 ◼   ► and the haptics didn't go off at all, right?

00:34:11 ◼   ► That would feel broken on the seven, right?

00:34:14 ◼   ► And so sometimes I feel like

00:34:15 ◼   ► if you're on a very flat table,

00:34:18 ◼   ► a very hard flat table with no case and you try to do it,

00:34:20 ◼   ► maybe it's somehow the haptics have no,

00:34:22 ◼   ► had nothing to move or vibrate,

00:34:24 ◼   ► and that feels a little bit more broken

00:34:26 ◼   ► than it does with the case,

00:34:27 ◼   ► so it could be the case it's helping me

00:34:28 ◼   ► like my home button more, but either way,

00:34:31 ◼   ► I'm willing to, you know, I like it better

00:34:35 ◼   ► even in that scenario.

00:34:36 ◼   ► - So do you, or what setting are you on

00:34:38 ◼   ► in terms of the--

00:34:39 ◼   ► - I'm just gonna go look that up.

00:34:40 ◼   ► Where is that in general?

00:34:41 ◼   ► - It's in general, it's home button.

00:34:43 ◼   ► - Everything's general.

00:34:44 ◼   ► - That's why it's aptly named.

00:34:46 ◼   ► It should just be called settings.

00:34:47 ◼   ► You go to settings and you go to settings.

00:34:49 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:34:50 ◼   ► No, I'm with you guys.

00:34:51 ◼   ► I totally agree.

00:34:52 ◼   ► I, the very first probably three or four days, I hated it.

00:34:57 ◼   ► I thought this is a huge step backwards.

00:34:58 ◼   ► I said as much here.

00:34:59 ◼   ► And somehow between now and then,

00:35:02 ◼   ► I've turned into not only liking it, but like Jon,

00:35:06 ◼   ► liking it more than the old buttons.

00:35:08 ◼   ► And the old buttons now feel weird to me.

00:35:10 ◼   ► That has not happened with Force Touch track pads

00:35:13 ◼   ► or the new keyboards on the MacBooks,

00:35:15 ◼   ► but that has definitely happened

00:35:17 ◼   ► with the Force Touch home button on the phones.

00:35:20 ◼   ► And I also would go a little bit further and say,

00:35:23 ◼   ► one of the great things about the iPhone 7

00:35:25 ◼   ► is that new Taptic Engine second generation

00:35:28 ◼   ► that has enabled,

00:35:30 ◼   ► because it's like a much more precise Taptic Engine

00:35:32 ◼   ► that can do a lot more stuff

00:35:33 ◼   ► and has like a whole sequencer for the things it does.

00:35:37 ◼   ► And so that has enabled all the little tiny

00:35:41 ◼   ► haptic feedback things throughout the interface.

00:35:43 ◼   ► And now that I am accustomed to that

00:35:47 ◼   ► in so many system standard apps

00:35:48 ◼   ► that use standard controls and standard haptics

00:35:51 ◼   ► and everything, when I go back, when I use like an iPad

00:35:54 ◼   ► that doesn't have the Taptic Engine,

00:35:57 ◼   ► and nothing gives me those little taps with everything,

00:35:59 ◼   ► it feels like something's broken.

00:36:00 ◼   ► It feels like, what's wrong?

00:36:02 ◼   ► Is this some kind of primitive piece of glass?

00:36:05 ◼   ► Like, it makes a huge difference.

00:36:06 ◼   ► So I also am a very big fan of haptics,

00:36:09 ◼   ► and especially the new Taptic Engine.

00:36:12 ◼   ► I look forward to seeing them added to more apps,

00:36:15 ◼   ► including probably my own once I get around to it.

00:36:18 ◼   ► Speaking of haptic feedback and things that feel broken, Marko, this is my brief complaint

00:36:22 ◼   ► about Overcast things.

00:36:23 ◼   ► I have really long lists, really long playlists, and when I try to drag something from way,

00:36:26 ◼   ► way down at the bottom to way, way up at the top, the maximum scroll speed as the little

00:36:30 ◼   ► haptics fire off is way too slow, and I just sit there holding it and going "dum, dum,

00:36:34 ◼   ► dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum."

00:36:36 ◼   ► And then, of course, Overcast refreshes the list and it yanks the thing that I was holding

00:36:40 ◼   ► in my hand, out of my hand, and drops it into the list wherever it was, and then I regrab

00:36:43 ◼   ► it and go "dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum."

00:36:46 ◼   ► Anyway, max speed should be higher.

00:36:47 ◼   ► - Alright, the second thing is my fault.

00:36:49 ◼   ► The first thing is, this is just the standard behavior

00:36:53 ◼   ► of UITableView.

00:36:54 ◼   ► - I know, but I believe in you.

00:36:56 ◼   ► I believe you can change the default behavior

00:36:58 ◼   ► and make it go faster.

00:37:00 ◼   ► - Given what you've done--

00:37:01 ◼   ► - If I have to do anything else to UITableView,

00:37:03 ◼   ► I'm just gonna move to UICollectionView.

00:37:06 ◼   ► Some people speculate that maybe CollectionViews

00:37:07 ◼   ► will replace TableViews.

00:37:08 ◼   ► - Yeah, I saw that article that TableView is for suckers.

00:37:11 ◼   ► It's all CollectionView now.

00:37:13 ◼   ► - Well, there's a bunch of things that TableViews

00:37:15 ◼   ► still do the collection views don't,

00:37:17 ◼   ► or that you'd have to write it yourself,

00:37:19 ◼   ► but I think I've probably crossed the threshold

00:37:21 ◼   ► after which, like, I've done so much work

00:37:24 ◼   ► to hack table views that maybe doing it

00:37:27 ◼   ► in a collection view would have been less work after all.

00:37:29 ◼   ► So, probably next time I redesign this interface,

00:37:32 ◼   ► if that ever happens, I'm not looking forward to that,

00:37:34 ◼   ► but if that ever happens, I will probably do

00:37:36 ◼   ► collection view instead.

00:37:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, go for a higher max scroll speed.

00:37:38 ◼   ► It can be ratchet up, it can be like slower than beginning,

00:37:40 ◼   ► and then you're holding it, and then it goes faster,

00:37:41 ◼   ► and you know, like, the same way that flick scrolling

00:37:43 ◼   ► kind of does where you can get it up to speed

00:37:47 ◼   ► because really long lists, like there's just no recourse.

00:37:49 ◼   ► It's just--

00:37:50 ◼   ► - Well, there is a shortcut.

00:37:52 ◼   ► If you start playing an item near the top

00:37:55 ◼   ► and on the items near the bottom

00:37:57 ◼   ► that you're trying to move all the way up,

00:37:58 ◼   ► play next, play next, play next, play next.

00:38:00 ◼   ► That'll move them all immediately.

00:38:01 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:38:02 ◼   ► All right, that was just an aside.

00:38:04 ◼   ► - It's funny you bring up the taptic, haptic,

00:38:07 ◼   ► whatever feedback because as an aside,

00:38:10 ◼   ► the other day I had a few minutes to kill at work

00:38:13 ◼   ► And the app that I work on, we have a scenario where there's a bunch of cards across the

00:38:20 ◼   ► bottom of the screen, and you can slide the cards left and right, and some will come from

00:38:25 ◼   ► off-screen onto screen and then go back off-screen again.

00:38:28 ◼   ► And this is the perfect moment to use that feedback and that tap, tap, tap as you're

00:38:35 ◼   ► scrolling through the cards and they're coming on and off-screen.

00:38:38 ◼   ► And I tried to get it to work just right.

00:38:40 ◼   ► And I couldn't get the math right such that when the card was at the midway point off

00:38:45 ◼   ► screen it would fire at the exact right moment.

00:38:47 ◼   ► It was very wonky.

00:38:48 ◼   ► It was probably my fault.

00:38:49 ◼   ► But I hope to at some point go back to finish that up because it really does work phenomenally

00:38:56 ◼   ► well when you get it right, but getting it right is kind of tough.

00:38:59 ◼   ► So yeah, I am in full support of third-party app developers putting that everywhere they

00:39:04 ◼   ► can in their apps because it's super cool.

00:39:06 ◼   ► The only bad thing about haptics right now

00:39:09 ◼   ► is that we really don't have a lot of control over them.

00:39:12 ◼   ► Like the options that we have are really coarse

00:39:15 ◼   ► and from what I understand, the way it's implemented

00:39:18 ◼   ► is basically a sound synthesizer.

00:39:20 ◼   ► You know, treating the tapping engine

00:39:21 ◼   ► like a big low frequency speaker.

00:39:23 ◼   ► And so apps in theory could have much more creativity

00:39:28 ◼   ► and options over the feeling and even possibly the direction

00:39:33 ◼   ► if that's a thing, you know, like side by side directions

00:39:36 ◼   ► of the haptics, that's not yet exposed in the API,

00:39:40 ◼   ► but maybe in iOS 11 or the future, maybe they will,

00:39:42 ◼   ► because I would love to do some custom stuff there

00:39:46 ◼   ► that just isn't possible right now.

00:39:49 ◼   ► - Yeah, I completely agree with you.

00:39:51 ◼   ► All right, anything else on these iPhone 8 rumors?

00:39:53 ◼   ► - I think at this point, there's so many crazy rumors,

00:39:56 ◼   ► we know so little, it's hard to comment intelligently

00:39:59 ◼   ► on much of it.

00:40:01 ◼   ► - Well, has that ever stopped us before?

00:40:03 ◼   ► - And by the way, the 9to5Mac article

00:40:05 ◼   ► that we're gonna link that has like the parts leak thing.

00:40:08 ◼   ► The parts leak was like a drawing,

00:40:09 ◼   ► which is always the best part,

00:40:11 ◼   ► like measurements on them and stuff like that.

00:40:12 ◼   ► It's good.

00:40:13 ◼   ► I actually took a screenshot of that thing

00:40:14 ◼   ► because those are so easy to verify.

00:40:16 ◼   ► Like they're down to the thousands of a millimeter.

00:40:19 ◼   ► We can verify those when the real phone comes out.

00:40:20 ◼   ► If it's exactly those dimensions

00:40:22 ◼   ► down to the thousands of the millimeter,

00:40:23 ◼   ► that was probably a legit leak.

00:40:24 ◼   ► If they're not, then that was just totally made up stuff.

00:40:26 ◼   ► But anyway, the 95 Mac article has a picture of like,

00:40:29 ◼   ► "Oh, here's a part.

00:40:30 ◼   ► "Looks just like that's a schematic."

00:40:31 ◼   ► It's just a rendering of the schematic.

00:40:33 ◼   ► Like the schematic is this supposed leak,

00:40:34 ◼   ► not this thing that looks like metal and the thing.

00:40:37 ◼   ► So don't be fooled by thinking someone found a metal thing

00:40:40 ◼   ► and took a fuzzy picture of it, it's just a rendering.

00:40:43 ◼   ► - Also real-time follow-up, the Touch ID hardware

00:40:45 ◼   ► as it exists today is capacitive, which I did not realize.

00:40:48 ◼   ► I thought it was optical.

00:40:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I think it's just like a really,

00:40:52 ◼   ► really high density capacitive layer,

00:40:55 ◼   ► like higher precision than the touch sensor

00:41:00 ◼   ► on the whole multi-touch screen, I assume, right?

00:41:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, the whole thing of like the capacitive stuff

00:41:06 ◼   ► the capacitive layering, there's two aspects.

00:41:08 ◼   ► There's one is the layering thing where you can make screens

00:41:11 ◼   ► out of a series of layers.

00:41:12 ◼   ► And one layer is the part that does the capacitive sensor.

00:41:14 ◼   ► You know, the layer is the part that has the, you know,

00:41:18 ◼   ► the color elements and the light up bits and, you know,

00:41:20 ◼   ► especially if it's an OLED screen,

00:41:21 ◼   ► but isn't this the new iPhone supposed to be all OLED

00:41:23 ◼   ► and everything.

00:41:24 ◼   ► So then you reduce the number of layers

00:41:26 ◼   ► because you don't have a light emitting layer

00:41:28 ◼   ► and a filter layer.

00:41:28 ◼   ► The little pixels themselves emit light,

00:41:31 ◼   ► But either way, you have to have a bunch of things

00:41:33 ◼   ► that emit light and then in between the light emitting things

00:41:37 ◼   ► you need the sensing things.

00:41:38 ◼   ► And the light emitting things don't have to fill

00:41:40 ◼   ► the whole area because there's light bloom and everything.

00:41:42 ◼   ► So the actual light emitting areas can actually be very small

00:41:44 ◼   ► and have mostly empty space between them.

00:41:46 ◼   ► It's just a question of trying to like

00:41:47 ◼   ► either weave that together or layer it over each other

00:41:50 ◼   ► such that the capacitive thing has this fine mesh

00:41:55 ◼   ► that's put over the light up things

00:41:56 ◼   ► but you don't notice the mesh because it's super fine.

00:41:58 ◼   ► Or you put it below the light up things like,

00:42:00 ◼   ► again, I'm just making up random words for tech here,

00:42:02 ◼   ► but it seems to me that it should be possible

00:42:06 ◼   ► to make a layer cake that works in some way.

00:42:09 ◼   ► The only question is how much worse does it work

00:42:12 ◼   ► than the existing Touch ID, which still has,

00:42:15 ◼   ► whatever, this is a layer of sapphire or glass

00:42:17 ◼   ► over the capacitive sensor, right?

00:42:19 ◼   ► So there's still some distance,

00:42:21 ◼   ► just no light being emitted from it.

00:42:23 ◼   ► And especially if they just darken that area of the screen

00:42:25 ◼   ► when you hold your finger on it

00:42:26 ◼   ► when it's expecting Touch ID or whatever,

00:42:28 ◼   ► There are ways around a lot of the limitations

00:42:30 ◼   ► that make me think it is feasible,

00:42:33 ◼   ► if not this year, then surely in a few years.

00:42:36 ◼   ► - We are sponsored this week by Eero.

00:42:39 ◼   ► Go to eero.com, that's E-E-R-O.com, to learn more.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Now look, we know how WiFi usually works.

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00:42:49 ◼   ► thinking you will finally cover your entire house

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00:42:53 ◼   ► in those two or three back rooms

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00:42:57 ◼   ► And in practice you get that big router home

00:42:59 ◼   ► and every time it says it's gonna have the best range

00:43:01 ◼   ► and it doesn't cover those rooms.

00:43:03 ◼   ► Wi-Fi has been broken for so long

00:43:05 ◼   ► because we rely on single routers.

00:43:07 ◼   ► Eero has come out to change that.

00:43:09 ◼   ► Eero is a system where you plug in one of these routers

00:43:13 ◼   ► as your main one, but then you buy more than one.

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00:43:17 ◼   ► whatever amount you need.

00:43:18 ◼   ► They cover about 1,000 square feet each.

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00:43:32 ◼   ► way better than a single router ever could.

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00:43:37 ◼   ► tons of great features, and they're updating it all the time

00:43:40 ◼   ► and the performance you get is way better

00:43:42 ◼   ► than you get out of a traditional repeater

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00:43:46 ◼   ► because they actually create a backhaul mesh network

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00:44:39 ◼   ► Highly recommend it.

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00:44:43 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

00:44:46 ◼   ► - So there's been a lot of motion

00:44:48 ◼   ► in this thing called Overcast.

00:44:53 ◼   ► I don't know if any of you are familiar with

00:44:55 ◼   ► with this, but apparently the developer of Overcast

00:44:58 ◼   ► has been very busy and getting work done,

00:45:00 ◼   ► and has tweeted, the Overcast account has tweeted,

00:45:05 ◼   ► found a fix for M4A chapters,

00:45:06 ◼   ► they'll return in the next version.

00:45:07 ◼   ► MP3 chapters continue to work great,

00:45:09 ◼   ► they'll be easier to create soon.

00:45:11 ◼   ► So there's a fair bit to unpack here,

00:45:15 ◼   ► but let's start with M4A, what'd you do Marco?

00:45:17 ◼   ► - So last episode I described the problem

00:45:19 ◼   ► that I was facing where basically

00:45:21 ◼   ► the Apple low-level parser would only recognize

00:45:25 ◼   ► chapters in MP3 and M4A files if they were named with .mp3 and .m4a extensions. And whenever

00:45:33 ◼   ► CAS downloads a file, it doesn't know the type yet until it starts downloading it, at

00:45:38 ◼   ► which point I'm already saving it to a file and would rather not move it for streaming

00:45:41 ◼   ► reasons in any way. And so the hack I was doing before was that upon playback, I would

00:45:48 ◼   ► temporarily create two symlinks to the unextensioned file, one of them with .mp3, one of them with

00:45:54 ◼   ► inside M4A, have Apple read those for the metadata parser

00:45:57 ◼   ► and then take the metadata from there.

00:45:59 ◼   ► I had mentioned that that was no longer working

00:46:04 ◼   ► with stability on APFS in 10.3.

00:46:07 ◼   ► Sometimes I would get crashes around

00:46:09 ◼   ► those similar creations or deletions.

00:46:11 ◼   ► And so to avoid these crashes,

00:46:13 ◼   ► I switched to my own metadata parser,

00:46:17 ◼   ► which only supported MP3, and said,

00:46:19 ◼   ► well, I'll figure out some other solution for M4A later.

00:46:21 ◼   ► I have to fix these crashes now.

00:46:23 ◼   ► And the solution I came to was just name all the files

00:46:26 ◼   ► .m4a and, (laughs)

00:46:30 ◼   ► 'cause I have my own parser now for MP3 chapters,

00:46:34 ◼   ► so and my parser is as smart as I want it to be.

00:46:38 ◼   ► And I decided to build in the smarts that say,

00:46:39 ◼   ► who cares what the file is named?

00:46:42 ◼   ► Just parse and look at these first bytes

00:46:44 ◼   ► and you can tell what format it is anyway.

00:46:45 ◼   ► So my parser is now responsible for MP3 streaming

00:46:51 ◼   ► and I use apples again for M4As on the files,

00:46:56 ◼   ► all of which are now named .m4a.

00:46:59 ◼   ► - That's both extremely clever

00:47:01 ◼   ► and completely bananas all at the same time.

00:47:03 ◼   ► - The perfect incarnation of file name extensions,

00:47:05 ◼   ► highlighting the fact that the name of the file

00:47:07 ◼   ► has no bearing whatsoever on the format

00:47:09 ◼   ► of the data it contains, and it's an absurd system,

00:47:11 ◼   ► and Marco is like, it's like a satire

00:47:14 ◼   ► of file name extensions, like, you know what,

00:47:15 ◼   ► I'm just naming every file a .m4a

00:47:17 ◼   ► 'cause that crap is meaningless, except to this stupid API

00:47:20 ◼   ► It's just stupid to know what the hell kind of file

00:47:22 ◼   ► it's being fed and doesn't let me specify it

00:47:24 ◼   ► and just figures it out by parsing the file name.

00:47:26 ◼   ► - Especially like almost all formats,

00:47:29 ◼   ► almost all modern file formats, even stuff as old as MP3,

00:47:32 ◼   ► you can usually tell what format it is

00:47:35 ◼   ► by looking at maybe the first 12 bytes of the file at most.

00:47:39 ◼   ► Some files you could tell with even less.

00:47:41 ◼   ► - That's what the file command does.

00:47:42 ◼   ► - Right, like it's really easy to detect it.

00:47:45 ◼   ► Like an M4A always looks the same

00:47:47 ◼   ► and it's super easy to see it.

00:47:49 ◼   ► And MP3s can look two different ways up front,

00:47:53 ◼   ► but they're both pretty easy to parse and detect.

00:47:56 ◼   ► Like I wrote code to do it,

00:47:57 ◼   ► and I'm not a super crazy file engineer.

00:48:01 ◼   ► Like I just looked up the specs for these formats,

00:48:03 ◼   ► and oh, well this format has these bytes up front,

00:48:05 ◼   ► and this one has these, done.

00:48:06 ◼   ► Like it isn't hard.

00:48:08 ◼   ► And you know, JPEG and ping, those can also,

00:48:10 ◼   ► those are like eight bytes at the beginning too.

00:48:12 ◼   ► It's super easy.

00:48:13 ◼   ► - Sometimes they begin with the letters J-P-E-G or G-I-F,

00:48:17 ◼   ► like literal ASCII text.

00:48:18 ◼   ► - It's J-F-I-F, but anyway, yeah.

00:48:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.

00:48:21 ◼   ► J-FIF, the Joint Something International Photo.

00:48:26 ◼   ► - I think it's Interchange Format.

00:48:29 ◼   ► - It doesn't really matter.

00:48:30 ◼   ► All right, so also in this tweet,

00:48:32 ◼   ► you had said, "MP3 chapters will be easier to create soon.

00:48:37 ◼   ► Tell me more."

00:48:40 ◼   ► - Ask again later.

00:48:41 ◼   ► Look, you all know I'm making forecasts.

00:48:45 ◼   ► The only question is when it comes out.

00:48:47 ◼   ► So when's it coming out?

00:48:48 ◼   ► - I don't know, probably soon.

00:48:50 ◼   ► - Oh yeah?

00:48:51 ◼   ► - I'm trying to, I'm putting out some overcast fires first,

00:48:53 ◼   ► but yeah, probably soon.

00:48:54 ◼   ► - It's been a long time coming.

00:48:55 ◼   ► I think it's been more than a year since this,

00:48:58 ◼   ► more than a year since you were willing to talk

00:49:00 ◼   ► about this program on the podcast in public,

00:49:02 ◼   ► and who knows how long before then.

00:49:04 ◼   ► This has been a heck of a gestation for this program.

00:49:07 ◼   ► This program that people have already been using

00:49:10 ◼   ► to do it for its intended purpose for a long time,

00:49:12 ◼   ► and you just haven't gotten around to the point

00:49:14 ◼   ► where you polished it up for release, right?

00:49:17 ◼   ► There are a few little things I wanna work out,

00:49:18 ◼   ► but they're like minor UI issues for the most part.

00:49:21 ◼   ► It should be coming soon.

00:49:24 ◼   ► - And for those who don't know,

00:49:26 ◼   ► forecast is a thing that's been charitably in private alpha

00:49:31 ◼   ► that Marco wrote in order to break a podcast into chapters

00:49:36 ◼   ► and do so easily and quickly.

00:49:38 ◼   ► - And people in the chat are asking about pricing.

00:49:40 ◼   ► The honest answer is that I still haven't quite decided

00:49:45 ◼   ► for sure, but I'm leaning towards just making it free,

00:49:48 ◼   ► but not open source.

00:49:50 ◼   ► And there's lots of reasons for this.

00:49:52 ◼   ► Maybe I'll talk about it once I release it,

00:49:55 ◼   ► if I go this way, but the gist of it is basically,

00:49:57 ◼   ► I don't think the market is going to be big enough

00:50:00 ◼   ► to make it worth charging money for.

00:50:03 ◼   ► Because when you charge money for things,

00:50:04 ◼   ► you have to support it in a very different way.

00:50:07 ◼   ► And there's overhead to that.

00:50:10 ◼   ► And I just don't think it would be worth it,

00:50:11 ◼   ► because I think the market for it is gonna be pretty small.

00:50:14 ◼   ► so I don't think it's worth charging.

00:50:17 ◼   ► And at the same time, open source is tricky

00:50:21 ◼   ► when you're talking about entire apps.

00:50:22 ◼   ► Like libraries and components, sure, that's easy.

00:50:25 ◼   ► When you're talking about entire apps though,

00:50:27 ◼   ► you have a lot of problems with people ripping it off

00:50:31 ◼   ► and uploading it to the app store under their own name.

00:50:35 ◼   ► It's a big problem when you open an entire app

00:50:38 ◼   ► doing stuff like that.

00:50:38 ◼   ► So I don't really wanna deal with that.

00:50:40 ◼   ► And I think the value of open source

00:50:44 ◼   ► is much higher at the library level

00:50:46 ◼   ► than at the entire app level.

00:50:48 ◼   ► - That's fair.

00:50:50 ◼   ► All right, so you've also been busy with your Apple Watch,

00:50:53 ◼   ► and we kinda made a mention of this earlier,

00:50:55 ◼   ► but it turns out your Apple Watch

00:50:57 ◼   ► does have a purpose after all.

00:50:59 ◼   ► - Yes, for testing my Apple Watch app.

00:51:01 ◼   ► No, it's fine. - Who knew?

00:51:03 ◼   ► - Yeah, I did a big watch update.

00:51:05 ◼   ► We had kind of alluded to this months ago,

00:51:07 ◼   ► and the truth is I've been working

00:51:09 ◼   ► on offline watch playback for months now.

00:51:14 ◼   ► It has taken a very long time.

00:51:16 ◼   ► And there's lots of reasons for that.

00:51:17 ◼   ► And it wasn't the only thing I was doing it during that time.

00:51:19 ◼   ► I did all of 3.0.

00:51:21 ◼   ► It was originally slated to be a headlining feature of 3.0.

00:51:26 ◼   ► There are lots of reasons why that didn't happen.

00:51:29 ◼   ► The main reason is that the state that I had it in

00:51:33 ◼   ► at the time 3.0 was going to ship,

00:51:35 ◼   ► it just had too many weird limitations and bugs.

00:51:39 ◼   ► and I decided it was not a good idea

00:51:42 ◼   ► to make a big deal out of this feature,

00:51:44 ◼   ► to have it be a headlining feature

00:51:46 ◼   ► of this major update of my app,

00:51:48 ◼   ► and to have it not work very well.

00:51:50 ◼   ► That didn't seem wise to me.

00:51:53 ◼   ► So instead, I pushed it off 'til later,

00:51:56 ◼   ► figuring maybe something will change in watchOS

00:51:59 ◼   ► in the next versions, and I can do it then.

00:52:03 ◼   ► And there were some other factors involved

00:52:05 ◼   ► that influenced this as well, but suffice to say,

00:52:09 ◼   ► it took a very long time to do because the way I did it,

00:52:12 ◼   ► in order to get podcast playback on the Apple Watch,

00:52:15 ◼   ► there's a bunch of major hoops you have to jump through.

00:52:18 ◼   ► One of them is just the data transfer.

00:52:21 ◼   ► Like the watch has very limited resources in all kinds.

00:52:25 ◼   ► That includes bandwidth, that includes storage,

00:52:27 ◼   ► and processing power.

00:52:29 ◼   ► And the API for it is very limited.

00:52:31 ◼   ► So there's certain things that you can't reliably do.

00:52:34 ◼   ► One of the things is that you can't reliably

00:52:37 ◼   ► just feed it any arbitrary podcast file off the internet and expect it to work. There

00:52:43 ◼   ► are limitations in its API, certain things that it doesn't play or it doesn't play very

00:52:47 ◼   ► well or certain formats and bit rates use way too much power and it actually becomes

00:52:53 ◼   ► like a noticeable load on the watch that you want to avoid. There's also issues like if

00:52:58 ◼   ► you're transferring it from the phone, then you have a serious problem of bandwidth and

00:53:03 ◼   ► of transfer speeds. It could take an hour to transfer a podcast file to the watch.

00:53:09 ◼   ► - Oh, seriously?

00:53:12 ◼   ► - If you don't compress it, yeah. It could take a long time. A lot of times it's transferring

00:53:17 ◼   ► over Bluetooth. Sometimes it'll use Wi-Fi if it can, but it's kind of vague as to when

00:53:21 ◼   ► and whether it will do that. So you can't really count on that. So basically it's a

00:53:25 ◼   ► huge challenge to get the files to the watch. And then once they're on the watch, there

00:53:32 ◼   ► There are massive challenges around,

00:53:34 ◼   ► there's only a few different ways to play audio on the watch.

00:53:39 ◼   ► WatchOS 3.2 added a couple of big things.

00:53:43 ◼   ► Before that, which was most of my development,

00:53:46 ◼   ► the APIs that were there,

00:53:47 ◼   ► there were like three different ways to play audio files,

00:53:49 ◼   ► and all of them had like fatal, massive problems

00:53:52 ◼   ► for playing podcasts.

00:53:54 ◼   ► One of them, you couldn't set the start time of the file,

00:53:57 ◼   ► so if you started it, and then you close it,

00:53:59 ◼   ► and you wanted to start it again,

00:54:00 ◼   ► you'd have to start from the beginning,

00:54:02 ◼   ► or somehow have the watch like splice the file.

00:54:05 ◼   ► One of my prototypes, I actually had the watch

00:54:08 ◼   ► splicing AAC files every 15 seconds

00:54:12 ◼   ► so that you would, so that it would be able to like

00:54:14 ◼   ► look and play this huge playlist.

00:54:16 ◼   ► It was, I tried a lot of things. (laughs)

00:54:20 ◼   ► And it was, it was a large period of trial and error.

00:54:25 ◼   ► Let's say that.

00:54:28 ◼   ► One of the APIs that you've probably seen before,

00:54:31 ◼   ► You could present a sheet that has the file,

00:54:35 ◼   ► but it only has the seek back and forward

00:54:37 ◼   ► by five seconds at a time,

00:54:39 ◼   ► and there's no way to change that UI.

00:54:41 ◼   ► So that is pretty bad also.

00:54:43 ◼   ► That it does allow a start time, which is fine,

00:54:45 ◼   ► but if you start a workout or a background,

00:54:47 ◼   ► then it stops playing.

00:54:49 ◼   ► So, and then there was a different one,

00:54:52 ◼   ► the WK Audio File Player API,

00:54:55 ◼   ► which is what the current store version, as we speak, uses.

00:54:58 ◼   ► And that has tons of problems,

00:55:01 ◼   ► and shortcomings, and it's bizarre things.

00:55:04 ◼   ► And by the way, I have filed bugs,

00:55:06 ◼   ► I have been in contact with Apple

00:55:08 ◼   ► about all these different shortcomings,

00:55:10 ◼   ► so I've done my duty there, but I don't think

00:55:14 ◼   ► they have a lot of resources to devote

00:55:15 ◼   ► to audio playback on the watch, honestly.

00:55:17 ◼   ► It seems like this is a pretty rarely used thing,

00:55:21 ◼   ► and their resources are probably elsewhere,

00:55:23 ◼   ► like iOS 11, so anyway.

00:55:28 ◼   ► One of the issues with the WK audio file API is like,

00:55:33 ◼   ► things like, if your app is in the background

00:55:37 ◼   ► and you initiate a player, that player will just never play.

00:55:41 ◼   ► It has some integration with the now playing glance.

00:55:46 ◼   ► So if you go to the now playing glance and hit next track,

00:55:50 ◼   ► whatever was playing will never play again.

00:55:53 ◼   ► But there's no way to tell in the API.

00:55:55 ◼   ► So you go back to the app and the API says,

00:55:58 ◼   ► I'm still playing, yes, I'm playing at 1X.

00:56:01 ◼   ► But then you just notice if you pull the time,

00:56:04 ◼   ► actually you say you're playing

00:56:05 ◼   ► and you say you're playing at 1X,

00:56:07 ◼   ► but the timestamp is not going up.

00:56:09 ◼   ► So in the version in the store right now,

00:56:11 ◼   ► I have things like timers that pull every so often

00:56:15 ◼   ► and check to see is the timestamp going up as it should.

00:56:20 ◼   ► If not, tear down and recreate the entire player.

00:56:24 ◼   ► There are so many limitations

00:56:27 ◼   ► and weird bugs with the current one.

00:56:30 ◼   ► What happened in 3.2, well first of all,

00:56:34 ◼   ► 3.2 made it possible at all to use this API

00:56:36 ◼   ► because they added a set time stamp method on that

00:56:39 ◼   ► so that you could start a file from the middle.

00:56:42 ◼   ► And then they also very quietly, with no comment,

00:56:46 ◼   ► except in the release notes, they added the ability

00:56:48 ◼   ► to use AV audio player.

00:56:51 ◼   ► I'm like, oh, yeah, it's like,

00:56:53 ◼   ► well then why bother with all this crap?

00:56:55 ◼   ► Yes, let me use that.

00:56:56 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:56:57 ◼   ► And I should point out too, as far as I know,

00:56:59 ◼   ► I don't think I can actually move my entire core audio stack

00:57:03 ◼   ► onto the watch yet.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Some of core audio is there,

00:57:07 ◼   ► I don't know if enough of it is there,

00:57:10 ◼   ► or if I'm maybe missing things like audio toolbox

00:57:12 ◼   ► and some of the little accessory things.

00:57:13 ◼   ► So I don't think I can actually move

00:57:15 ◼   ► the entire thing over yet.

00:57:17 ◼   ► But AV audio player is good enough to do everything

00:57:21 ◼   ► except smart speed and voice boost.

00:57:23 ◼   ► And it has everything else in here,

00:57:25 ◼   ► It has a pretty good speed engine.

00:57:27 ◼   ► It is an in-process API.

00:57:30 ◼   ► The only reason I wasn't using it before

00:57:32 ◼   ► in the version that's in the store right now

00:57:34 ◼   ► is that it wasn't backgrounding for me,

00:57:39 ◼   ► reliably enough at least.

00:57:40 ◼   ► Like it would background sometimes and other times.

00:57:41 ◼   ► And I realized yesterday you had to set different

00:57:46 ◼   ► background audio flags in different places for that one

00:57:49 ◼   ► than you did for the original WK audio player.

00:57:52 ◼   ► Once I set those, it works perfectly.

00:57:55 ◼   ► Well, with a few bugs along the way,

00:57:59 ◼   ► but suffice to say, those are all fixed now,

00:58:01 ◼   ► as of about two hours ago.

00:58:03 ◼   ► It works perfectly.

00:58:04 ◼   ► The version that is currently awaiting Apple's approval

00:58:07 ◼   ► is this new version with AV audio player.

00:58:09 ◼   ► It's going to be awesome.

00:58:10 ◼   ► I should point out a few other things

00:58:12 ◼   ► that I hit along the way.

00:58:13 ◼   ► One of the things I did early on that took some time

00:58:17 ◼   ► but was worth it, as I mentioned,

00:58:19 ◼   ► none of these methods on the watch support

00:58:21 ◼   ► smart speed or voice boost.

00:58:22 ◼   ► And if you're accustomed to listening to over-catch

00:58:25 ◼   ► with smart speed, listening to anything else

00:58:28 ◼   ► seems kind of broken, it just sounds wrong.

00:58:31 ◼   ► And you can do basic speed-ups on the watch,

00:58:34 ◼   ► but I don't have the low-level access to the audio stream

00:58:37 ◼   ► to be able to do smart speed.

00:58:39 ◼   ► And so what I did instead was on the phone,

00:58:42 ◼   ► I experimented and found something fast enough eventually,

00:58:45 ◼   ► I'm actually transcoding the files on the phone.

00:58:48 ◼   ► If you have smart speed enabled, it bakes in smart speed.

00:58:52 ◼   ► - That's kinda bananas.

00:58:53 ◼   ► - You know, whatever settings that you would play the track

00:58:57 ◼   ► on on your phone, if you have it say,

00:58:59 ◼   ► play at smart speed at 1.25x,

00:59:01 ◼   ► then it will play on the watch at 1.25x

00:59:04 ◼   ► and it'll have smart speed baked in.

00:59:06 ◼   ► I'm not able to do voice boost yet,

00:59:08 ◼   ► and this is due to some low-level implementation details.

00:59:10 ◼   ► Basically, if I run this through an audio graph,

00:59:14 ◼   ► it is 10 times slower,

00:59:16 ◼   ► and it transcodes at about 12x real time.

00:59:19 ◼   ► If I don't run it through an audio graph

00:59:20 ◼   ► and just process the samples raw,

00:59:22 ◼   ► it runs at about 110 or 112X on an iPhone 7.

00:59:26 ◼   ► So I can transcode, you know,

00:59:28 ◼   ► a hundred times faster than real time

00:59:30 ◼   ► by not using the graph. - Goodness.

00:59:31 ◼   ► - So doing it through the graph is just too slow

00:59:35 ◼   ► to really ship that, and so there's no voice boost yet.

00:59:40 ◼   ► I have not yet written my own voice boost

00:59:42 ◼   ► that doesn't use a combination of audio units.

00:59:44 ◼   ► I plan to, but I haven't yet.

00:59:46 ◼   ► That's a low-level thing that'll be a fun project someday,

00:59:49 ◼   ► but it hasn't happened yet.

00:59:50 ◼   ► So that's why there's no voice boost,

00:59:52 ◼   ► but there is smart speed because smart speed

00:59:53 ◼   ► is a combination of C functions, not audio units.

00:59:58 ◼   ► So anyway, long story short,

01:00:01 ◼   ► when you send a file to the watch,

01:00:05 ◼   ► the phone transcodes it.

01:00:07 ◼   ► It transcodes it also down to a lower bit rate.

01:00:10 ◼   ► I did a whole bunch of testing to figure out

01:00:12 ◼   ► what is the best low bit rate way for spoken audio

01:00:16 ◼   ► to be heard on a watch.

01:00:18 ◼   ► Obviously there is some quality loss,

01:00:20 ◼   ► So it's just a question of balance, of how do I balance this?

01:00:22 ◼   ► Because the bigger the files are,

01:00:25 ◼   ► the much longer they take to transfer to the watch.

01:00:28 ◼   ► For me, a whole bunch of testing with HEAAC and AAC

01:00:33 ◼   ► and even things like some of the newer formats,

01:00:36 ◼   ► the OGG, what is it, Opus?

01:00:38 ◼   ► I don't know if it's, sorry if it's not officially OGG,

01:00:40 ◼   ► but it's from those people.

01:00:41 ◼   ► The new Opus format, and there's a whole bunch

01:00:43 ◼   ► of other stuff, and that would have been harder to decode

01:00:46 ◼   ► 'cause the watch doesn't support it.

01:00:47 ◼   ► Anyway, I did a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

01:00:50 ◼   ► I'm transcoding to that on the phone, on demand,

01:00:53 ◼   ► baking in smart speed.

01:00:54 ◼   ► It also has a few other cool optimizations.

01:00:56 ◼   ► For example, if you are halfway through a podcast

01:00:59 ◼   ► and you say send to the watch,

01:01:00 ◼   ► it only sends the second half,

01:01:02 ◼   ► 'cause there's no reason to send

01:01:03 ◼   ► the part you already listened to.

01:01:04 ◼   ► Anyway, here's all my secrets, that's how you do it.

01:01:07 ◼   ► And it's a whole lot of work,

01:01:09 ◼   ► but now I finally have offline watch playback,

01:01:12 ◼   ► and with the version that will hopefully be approved

01:01:14 ◼   ► in the next day or two, it'll be way, way better,

01:01:17 ◼   ► 'cause it'll move to this newer API that's way more stable

01:01:20 ◼   ► and has speaker output and everything else.

01:01:22 ◼   ► So it's been quite a trip.

01:01:26 ◼   ► Oh, not to mention the whole system of like syncing

01:01:28 ◼   ► between the watch and the phone, that's a thing.

01:01:30 ◼   ► You have to sync your progress and not lose stuff

01:01:32 ◼   ► and not have stuff clobber itself during sync

01:01:33 ◼   ► and everything else.

01:01:34 ◼   ► It's been some, quite a lot of effort.

01:01:39 ◼   ► And all of this is for a feature

01:01:43 ◼   ► that relatively nobody will use.

01:01:46 ◼   ► And it's hard to justify this, but there's a few reasons

01:01:49 ◼   ► why I thought it was worth it.

01:01:51 ◼   ► Right now, according to my analytics,

01:01:53 ◼   ► something like half a percent of people

01:01:56 ◼   ► are using it or something like that.

01:01:58 ◼   ► And I haven't done a great job of promoting it,

01:02:00 ◼   ► so a lot of people don't know it's there yet,

01:02:02 ◼   ► but there's not a lot of people

01:02:05 ◼   ► who are gonna use this feature.

01:02:07 ◼   ► But it was a very highly demanded feature,

01:02:10 ◼   ► and it's the kind of thing where you might decide.

01:02:12 ◼   ► So what I've done is, while testing this,

01:02:16 ◼   ► I have paired my favorite walking headphones to my watch.

01:02:21 ◼   ► And so it kind of forces me to use my watch more

01:02:24 ◼   ► as the podcast player because I don't wanna unpair

01:02:26 ◼   ► and repair my headphones back to my phone

01:02:27 ◼   ► every time I leave to walk the dog.

01:02:30 ◼   ► So I've kinda gotten into this habit

01:02:32 ◼   ► over the last week or two and really gotten into this.

01:02:37 ◼   ► And it is pretty cool, I gotta say it.

01:02:39 ◼   ► It is pretty nice.

01:02:40 ◼   ► It's not as good as using a phone,

01:02:43 ◼   ► but you have to carry a phone.

01:02:45 ◼   ► And for a lot of people, people have been begging me

01:02:47 ◼   ► since the watch came out.

01:02:48 ◼   ► This has been one of the top featured,

01:02:52 ◼   ► one of the top feature requests for Overcast

01:02:54 ◼   ► since the watch came out.

01:02:55 ◼   ► Because a lot of people either can't or don't want

01:02:59 ◼   ► to bring their phone certain places

01:03:01 ◼   ► where they can bring their watch.

01:03:02 ◼   ► It's a very common request, for example,

01:03:04 ◼   ► in certain kinds of exercise like jogging

01:03:06 ◼   ► where a lot of people don't wanna carry their phone

01:03:08 ◼   ► or it's too clunky or it's in some kind of

01:03:10 ◼   ► inconvenient arm thing or backpack or something else,

01:03:13 ◼   ► then they want it to be totally on their watch.

01:03:16 ◼   ► So I understand that, I'm probably never gonna run

01:03:18 ◼   ► in my life, but I understand the people who do.

01:03:21 ◼   ► So it matters a lot to a small number of people.

01:03:26 ◼   ► That's the kind of thing I enjoy doing.

01:03:30 ◼   ► It's never gonna be worth it by the numbers,

01:03:32 ◼   ► but I do enjoy doing it just because of how much

01:03:35 ◼   ► it matters to that small number of people.

01:03:37 ◼   ► And the fact is, it also, I think business-wise,

01:03:41 ◼   ► it might also be a safe bet.

01:03:43 ◼   ► it might also be a good thing to do

01:03:45 ◼   ► because Apple likes it for one thing.

01:03:48 ◼   ► So it probably makes my app more likely

01:03:50 ◼   ► to be featured by Apple in the future.

01:03:52 ◼   ► Maybe it increases my chances of getting an ADA.

01:03:55 ◼   ► One can hope.

01:03:56 ◼   ► I never really think I have a chance at that,

01:03:58 ◼   ► but I really want one, so one can hope, right?

01:04:01 ◼   ► I also, I think that it's the kind of feature,

01:04:05 ◼   ► kind of like when people buy SUVs,

01:04:07 ◼   ► and like, what if I need to haul something someday?

01:04:10 ◼   ► And they never haul anything, right?

01:04:12 ◼   ► But I feel like if you're looking at podcast apps

01:04:15 ◼   ► that are out there, and you might think,

01:04:18 ◼   ► oh, I want that, even if you never end up using it,

01:04:21 ◼   ► or you hardly ever use it,

01:04:22 ◼   ► that might have still helped me get that sale,

01:04:26 ◼   ► or get that person to use Overcast

01:04:27 ◼   ► instead of something else.

01:04:29 ◼   ► So I think for a lot of reasons,

01:04:31 ◼   ► I think it is probably worth having done.

01:04:34 ◼   ► It did take a lot longer than I thought it would,

01:04:36 ◼   ► and a lot more work than I thought it would.

01:04:38 ◼   ► And it's not done either.

01:04:39 ◼   ► There's, what I have now is a system

01:04:42 ◼   ► where you still have to manually send episodes

01:04:45 ◼   ► one by one to the watch,

01:04:46 ◼   ► and they still take forever to transfer.

01:04:49 ◼   ► And I'm not entirely sure I can ever really fix

01:04:51 ◼   ► the taking forever to transfer thing.

01:04:53 ◼   ► That might just have to wait out the hardware advancements.

01:04:57 ◼   ► But sending one by one to the watch is also not great.

01:05:01 ◼   ► People have requested things like

01:05:02 ◼   ► automatically send episodes of this podcast

01:05:05 ◼   ► or this playlist to the watch,

01:05:06 ◼   ► and that has its own challenges and limitations.

01:05:09 ◼   ► Like for instance, I don't really know how much space

01:05:11 ◼   ► I have to deal with.

01:05:12 ◼   ► And if you tell people,

01:05:14 ◼   ► you can send this playlist to the watch,

01:05:17 ◼   ► I'm gonna design this feature for my playlist,

01:05:18 ◼   ► which might have like 15 podcasts on it at most,

01:05:21 ◼   ► and then somebody like Jon is gonna use it,

01:05:23 ◼   ► and they're gonna try to sync 400 audiobooks to it,

01:05:25 ◼   ► and they're gonna be mad when it doesn't work,

01:05:27 ◼   ► 'cause there's not enough space in the watch,

01:05:29 ◼   ► which I can't even tell as the programmer.

01:05:30 ◼   ► So doing anything more

01:05:33 ◼   ► because of the constrained nature of the watch

01:05:37 ◼   ► is gonna be harder than doing those same things

01:05:39 ◼   ► on the iPhone.

01:05:40 ◼   ► It's also gonna be like massive UI challenges, right?

01:05:44 ◼   ► Like people are already asking for things

01:05:45 ◼   ► like chapter navigation on the watch.

01:05:48 ◼   ► And it's really hard to fit a good UI

01:05:52 ◼   ► that is both attractive and usable on that watch screen.

01:05:57 ◼   ► And it's, everything people want me to do

01:06:01 ◼   ► with this feature is going to be hard to do, basically.

01:06:06 ◼   ► But I think I finally got the basics nailed down

01:06:09 ◼   ► in this update that hopefully will be shipping

01:06:11 ◼   ► around the time this podcast comes out,

01:06:14 ◼   ► the 3.1.2 update.

01:06:16 ◼   ► Hopefully everybody will have that now

01:06:19 ◼   ► and it's gonna be great.

01:06:20 ◼   ► And I'm kinda glad to have it finally be done

01:06:22 ◼   ► and now I have a reason to use my watch again.

01:06:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, so have you been using the watch

01:06:27 ◼   ► for anything other than podcasting?

01:06:29 ◼   ► - Well, you know, I use it on my dog walks.

01:06:32 ◼   ► So, you know, I still prefer mechanical watches greatly

01:06:35 ◼   ► for general use and general wearing,

01:06:39 ◼   ► but the Apple Watch is, as the entire world plus Apple

01:06:43 ◼   ► have figured out over the last year or two,

01:06:45 ◼   ► whatever it's been, the Apple Watch is pretty good

01:06:47 ◼   ► for fitness stuff.

01:06:48 ◼   ► And so I am quite enjoying on my dog walks

01:06:51 ◼   ► being able to track the time and distance that I have gone

01:06:55 ◼   ► and get a nice cool GPS map of it if I ever want that.

01:06:59 ◼   ► It will probably remain my taking walks watch,

01:07:03 ◼   ► but for other times in my day,

01:07:06 ◼   ► I prefer mechanicals for other reasons.

01:07:08 ◼   ► - Did you get a Series 2?

01:07:10 ◼   ► You mentioned the GPS, are you saying,

01:07:11 ◼   ► 'cause you have your phone with you,

01:07:12 ◼   ► that's why you get the GPS trace?

01:07:14 ◼   ► - No, I actually did get a Series 2.

01:07:15 ◼   ► I got a Series 2 this past spring,

01:07:19 ◼   ► or this past winter, while testing this,

01:07:20 ◼   ► because the build, run, debug loop on the Apple Watch

01:07:24 ◼   ► is so incredibly slow, 'cause the hardware is really basic,

01:07:29 ◼   ► and when you're doing build and run,

01:07:31 ◼   ► and build and run and debug,

01:07:32 ◼   ► it's all going also through your phone

01:07:34 ◼   ► and then to the watch over Bluetooth or whatever.

01:07:36 ◼   ► It's very, very slow to the point where

01:07:39 ◼   ► changing something on the watch and building and running

01:07:42 ◼   ► might be a 45 second long cycle.

01:07:44 ◼   ► And when you're doing a lot of that,

01:07:45 ◼   ► that time really adds up and really gets annoying.

01:07:48 ◼   ► So after a day of trying all these deployment methods

01:07:53 ◼   ► in the watch, I went to the Apple store and got a series two

01:07:56 ◼   ► 'cause I asked Underscore, is it faster?

01:07:59 ◼   ► And he actually, of course, he timed it.

01:08:00 ◼   ► And of course he knew exactly to the second.

01:08:03 ◼   ► And it was something like 20 seconds faster

01:08:05 ◼   ► on the Series 2, I'm like done, sold.

01:08:07 ◼   ► If you can save me 20 seconds every single time

01:08:09 ◼   ► I'm building and running on the watch,

01:08:11 ◼   ► that is going to add up, and it did.

01:08:14 ◼   ► So I do have a Series 2, I'm very, very glad

01:08:16 ◼   ► I got the Series 2 because the difference

01:08:19 ◼   ► for development was immediately and incredibly apparent.

01:08:24 ◼   ► - So what Series 2 did you get?

01:08:26 ◼   ► I know you're just getting it, oh I just want

01:08:27 ◼   ► something that's faster for me to do my builds on, right?

01:08:29 ◼   ► but then did you go, okay, well since I'm buying one,

01:08:32 ◼   ► which one do I want, what color do I want, what bands,

01:08:34 ◼   ► like, what did you get?

01:08:36 ◼   ► - You know, I did go through a lot of that debate,

01:08:38 ◼   ► 'cause I'm like, I'm just getting it for development,

01:08:40 ◼   ► I should just get the aluminum basic cheapo,

01:08:42 ◼   ► the cheapest one I can get, like, you know, just get down.

01:08:44 ◼   ► I should even--

01:08:45 ◼   ► - And every fiber of your being screams out, no!

01:08:48 ◼   ► - Well, and in theory, I don't even need the Series 2,

01:08:50 ◼   ► I could've gotten the Series 1.

01:08:52 ◼   ► Same processor, same speed, just, you know, no GPS.

01:08:55 ◼   ► - No GPS, yes. - And not super waterproof.

01:08:57 ◼   ► So I could've gotten that.

01:08:59 ◼   ► - But once again, your inner Marco says no.

01:09:02 ◼   ► - Well, here's the thing.

01:09:04 ◼   ► - Oh, here we go.

01:09:06 ◼   ► - So I'm accustomed to now wearing nice watches.

01:09:08 ◼   ► The reason I got into nice--

01:09:10 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:09:11 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

01:09:11 ◼   ► - You need to have a watch that lets you live in the style

01:09:13 ◼   ► to which you have become accustomed.

01:09:15 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:09:16 ◼   ► - The reason I got into nice watches

01:09:19 ◼   ► is because I fell in love with how the Apple Watch

01:09:24 ◼   ► made me feel when I looked at it on my wrist.

01:09:27 ◼   ► That is why.

01:09:28 ◼   ► When the Apple Watch first came out,

01:09:30 ◼   ► I obsessed crazily over which bands to get,

01:09:33 ◼   ► which color combinations worked.

01:09:35 ◼   ► I went over this for weeks, I was agonizing,

01:09:39 ◼   ► oh, will this band be more convenient to latch

01:09:41 ◼   ► or this one or whatever else?

01:09:43 ◼   ► And so it mattered a lot to me.

01:09:45 ◼   ► I really enjoy the way the Steel Watch looks.

01:09:49 ◼   ► And I really, unfortunately, don't enjoy

01:09:51 ◼   ► the way the aluminum ones look.

01:09:53 ◼   ► The aluminum ones, to me, look a lot

01:09:56 ◼   ► like a phone on your wrist.

01:09:57 ◼   ► The steel ones don't look like an analog device

01:10:00 ◼   ► by any means, but I think the steel ones

01:10:03 ◼   ► are very attractive.

01:10:04 ◼   ► I decided after much agonizing

01:10:06 ◼   ► that I wanted a steel one again.

01:10:08 ◼   ► The only way to get a steel one was to get the Series 2.

01:10:11 ◼   ► You can get the Series 1 in steel.

01:10:13 ◼   ► So I got the Series 2 and I got the steel

01:10:15 ◼   ► and I have it on, I think I came with a Milanese

01:10:19 ◼   ► 'cause that was the only one I could get in stock

01:10:20 ◼   ► which I immediately sold

01:10:22 ◼   ► and I'm just using my old sport band with it.

01:10:25 ◼   ► - It makes me a little sad

01:10:26 ◼   ► that you haven't decided to come crawling back

01:10:29 ◼   ► to the Apple Watch, but you know, to each their own.

01:10:30 ◼   ► Like what you like.

01:10:31 ◼   ► - No, I mean, it has, no question, it has a lot of utility,

01:10:35 ◼   ► but it also has a lot of things it's not so great about.

01:10:39 ◼   ► And it like, man, I'm telling, when I'm wearing it now,

01:10:43 ◼   ► like for this testing, these testing periods,

01:10:45 ◼   ► every time I turn my wrist to look at the time,

01:10:49 ◼   ► it doesn't show.

01:10:50 ◼   ► Like every time, it's just like, just,

01:10:52 ◼   ► oh, let me exaggerate this motion again,

01:10:54 ◼   ► or let me tap it and it's just like, oh, come on.

01:10:56 ◼   ► So yeah, like when you're accustomed to regular watches,

01:11:00 ◼   ► the Apple Watch has a few things about it

01:11:01 ◼   ► that are very annoying,

01:11:02 ◼   ► mostly the delay when looking at the time.

01:11:05 ◼   ► And so it's fine, you know.

01:11:08 ◼   ► All the utilities of it,

01:11:10 ◼   ► things like notifications all day and stuff,

01:11:13 ◼   ► I don't really care.

01:11:15 ◼   ► I turn off most notifications.

01:11:16 ◼   ► I don't like having a lot of them.

01:11:18 ◼   ► So most of that stuff is not of much use to me.

01:11:23 ◼   ► and the fitness stuff, I don't usually have much

01:11:25 ◼   ► of a fitness regimen.

01:11:27 ◼   ► When I do, it's extensive dog walking,

01:11:29 ◼   ► so I'm using it now for that.

01:11:31 ◼   ► For most things in my life, I don't have the kind

01:11:34 ◼   ► of lifestyle that benefits heavily

01:11:36 ◼   ► from the Apple Watch's good things,

01:11:38 ◼   ► and the Apple Watch's bad things irritate me.

01:11:41 ◼   ► - Did you get the Earth Day badge?

01:11:43 ◼   ► - I did not.

01:11:44 ◼   ► I did get, reminds it about the Earth Day badge

01:11:47 ◼   ► on Earth Day, but I hit dismiss and did not get it.

01:11:51 ◼   ► Now I didn't get it because it was disgusting weather over here.

01:11:55 ◼   ► I didn't get that one.

01:11:56 ◼   ► I did get the Turkey Day one, but I did not get the Earth Day one.

01:11:59 ◼   ► Did you, Jon?

01:12:00 ◼   ► No.

01:12:01 ◼   ► Fair enough.

01:12:02 ◼   ► And you haven't put your watch on in months, I assume?

01:12:04 ◼   ► I wore it on vacation.

01:12:05 ◼   ► I wore it the whole week.

01:12:06 ◼   ► Why did you wear it on vacation?

01:12:07 ◼   ► That's what I do.

01:12:08 ◼   ► I do it when I travel.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Well, and I will say, it is a really nice travel watch because it sets its own time

01:12:14 ◼   ► zone and you can have your boarding passes showing on it and everything else.

01:12:17 ◼   ► So it is kind of nice for that.

01:12:19 ◼   ► - You've been walking directions in the city

01:12:20 ◼   ► to be able to tap on your wrist

01:12:21 ◼   ► to tell you which street to turn down

01:12:23 ◼   ► instead of having to constantly take out your phone.

01:12:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's true, yeah.

01:12:26 ◼   ► The main downside for me is then you have to bring

01:12:27 ◼   ► its separate charger.

01:12:29 ◼   ► And I'm trying to minimize the chargers

01:12:31 ◼   ► that I bring on trips,

01:12:32 ◼   ► and that's usually a really easy one to let go of.

01:12:35 ◼   ► - All right, anything else on anything watch-related?

01:12:39 ◼   ► - Hopefully not.

01:12:41 ◼   ► It's been a lot, a lot of Apple Watch stuff

01:12:44 ◼   ► the last couple of weeks, but.

01:12:46 ◼   ► - You've been working a lot.

01:12:48 ◼   ► - Yeah, I know. - I'm proud of you.

01:12:50 ◼   ► - Well, and like this whole,

01:12:51 ◼   ► like the whole transcoding engine

01:12:53 ◼   ► and baking in smart speed,

01:12:54 ◼   ► that I did, that work was all done months ago.

01:12:57 ◼   ► And I've just been sitting on it

01:12:58 ◼   ► waiting for a chance to use it.

01:13:00 ◼   ► And waiting for basically waiting for the watch APIs

01:13:04 ◼   ► to both get better and for me to figure them out.

01:13:07 ◼   ► Which both had to happen for this to finally be released.

01:13:10 ◼   ► But here it is.

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01:15:14 ◼   ► - Yet another tick in the Uber is gross box.

01:15:21 ◼   ► It seems like Uber has been using private APIs

01:15:27 ◼   ► to read iPhone serial numbers,

01:15:31 ◼   ► or they were doing this anyway a couple of years ago.

01:15:34 ◼   ► They were reading iPhone serial numbers,

01:15:35 ◼   ► reporting them up to their own servers,

01:15:38 ◼   ► And thus, this allowed them to track installations between deletes.

01:15:45 ◼   ► So you could install Uber.

01:15:47 ◼   ► It would look at your phone's serial number.

01:15:49 ◼   ► Let's call it 12345.

01:15:50 ◼   ► It's the same combination I have in my luggage.

01:15:52 ◼   ► And then you would delete the app.

01:15:55 ◼   ► You could then reinstall it later.

01:15:57 ◼   ► It will see that the serial number is still 12345.

01:15:59 ◼   ► And it would say, "Ha ha!

01:16:00 ◼   ► This is user ABCDEFG."

01:16:03 ◼   ► And so allegedly they were using this for fraud prevention, which is a legitimate explanation,

01:16:10 ◼   ► I think, but it just feels super gross.

01:16:15 ◼   ► And so the story goes that Tim Cook called in Travis Kalanick, Kalanick, whatever his

01:16:19 ◼   ► name is, the really skeezy head of Uber, and basically said, "If you don't get rid of this

01:16:26 ◼   ► post-haste, we're going to pull you from the App Store."

01:16:28 ◼   ► And guess what happened?

01:16:29 ◼   ► They got rid of it.

01:16:30 ◼   ► I don't think there's that many interesting things

01:16:33 ◼   ► to discuss here, but perhaps one of you

01:16:36 ◼   ► has some thoughts that I haven't thought of yet.

01:16:38 ◼   ► - I mean, to me, the main interesting part here,

01:16:40 ◼   ► I mean, we know this has been talked to death

01:16:41 ◼   ► on other shows, so we're not gonna spend

01:16:43 ◼   ► a lot of time on it.

01:16:44 ◼   ► The interesting part to me here is not necessarily

01:16:47 ◼   ► the horrible things that Uber did,

01:16:49 ◼   ► because Uber's always doing horrible things.

01:16:51 ◼   ► I urge anybody out there to stop using it.

01:16:54 ◼   ► I've been using Lyft since one of their other

01:16:56 ◼   ► recent scandals, and it's great.

01:16:57 ◼   ► It's totally fine.

01:16:58 ◼   ► It's like the same or better.

01:16:59 ◼   ► so just use Lyft or something else, you know, it's fine.

01:17:03 ◼   ► Stop using Uber.

01:17:04 ◼   ► Anyway, one of the cool things about this

01:17:08 ◼   ► that I thought was worth mentioning is,

01:17:10 ◼   ► and first of all, all these holes

01:17:12 ◼   ► that we know of are now patched.

01:17:14 ◼   ► IOkit, IOkit's a weird framework.

01:17:17 ◼   ► There's all sorts of stuff on your phone

01:17:20 ◼   ► that apps should not have access to.

01:17:23 ◼   ► Things like the phone part of it.

01:17:25 ◼   ► You know, there's a reason why apps can't like, you know,

01:17:27 ◼   ► dial your phone for you without interaction

01:17:29 ◼   ► or read your phone calls or anything.

01:17:31 ◼   ► All the stuff that iOS must wall off from apps

01:17:36 ◼   ► is a private framework.

01:17:37 ◼   ► And the way iOS is structured, apps,

01:17:41 ◼   ► with the exception of jailbreaking,

01:17:42 ◼   ► which ruins everything, but regularly in your phone,

01:17:46 ◼   ► apps can't call into private frameworks.

01:17:48 ◼   ► They just technically can't.

01:17:50 ◼   ► There's no way to do it.

01:17:51 ◼   ► They're walled off from apps.

01:17:53 ◼   ► IOkit is technically not one of these.

01:17:56 ◼   ► The role of IOkit in iOS is mostly to read data

01:18:03 ◼   ► about the hardware, and a lot of things

01:18:05 ◼   ► that are in the UI device API are just thin wrappers

01:18:09 ◼   ► around UIkit calls, things like reading

01:18:11 ◼   ► the screen brightness level, or the system--

01:18:14 ◼   ► - Thin wrappers around IOkit calls.

01:18:15 ◼   ► - Sorry, yeah, or the system battery level,

01:18:18 ◼   ► or things like that, just information about the hardware.

01:18:22 ◼   ► This is where things like the UDID used to be,

01:18:25 ◼   ► although now that's no longer available.

01:18:27 ◼   ► And Apple is pretty good about any way that you have

01:18:33 ◼   ► to uniquely identify phones,

01:18:35 ◼   ► Apple has been slowly getting rid of.

01:18:37 ◼   ► IO kit, for whatever reason, as I said,

01:18:40 ◼   ► it's not in that walled off area

01:18:44 ◼   ► where the rest of the private frameworks are.

01:18:46 ◼   ► So it actually is callable.

01:18:48 ◼   ► But you aren't allowed to.

01:18:51 ◼   ► It's undocumented, at least on iOS,

01:18:53 ◼   ► and it's officially forbidden.

01:18:56 ◼   ► And Uber is doing all sorts of tricks

01:18:57 ◼   ► to avoid being detected.

01:18:59 ◼   ► So I think there are two angles of this

01:19:02 ◼   ► that are worth talking about.

01:19:04 ◼   ► One is, is it possible for Apple to prevent

01:19:09 ◼   ► the use of private APIs on a large scale?

01:19:15 ◼   ► The way that they usually prevent it is during app review,

01:19:18 ◼   ► they have some kind of special testing environment

01:19:21 ◼   ► where if an app calls a private API during app review,

01:19:26 ◼   ► or if it has a private API symbols,

01:19:30 ◼   ► like literally in the app,

01:19:32 ◼   ► so if it has like the name of a private function

01:19:34 ◼   ► in the code, Apple can flag that

01:19:36 ◼   ► and they will reject it automatically for that.

01:19:39 ◼   ► But there are ways to get around this.

01:19:41 ◼   ► One of them is you can load the module dynamically,

01:19:44 ◼   ► or you can not have the name of the function in the code,

01:19:47 ◼   ► You can have a scrambled string that in code

01:19:52 ◼   ► you unscramble at runtime and then call that.

01:19:55 ◼   ► That's usually how these things are done.

01:19:58 ◼   ► And again, this doesn't work for calling

01:19:59 ◼   ► super private framework stuff, but it does work

01:20:01 ◼   ► for calling private methods on public things

01:20:04 ◼   ► or for the framework of IO kit, which is this weird

01:20:08 ◼   ► kind of middle ground where it is kind of technically public.

01:20:10 ◼   ► Anyway, do you think there is a way

01:20:13 ◼   ► for Apple to ever fix that?

01:20:16 ◼   ► It's kind of the halting problem thing where can you tell me here is this program?

01:20:22 ◼   ► Can you tell me how this program behaves, you know?

01:20:25 ◼   ► In the general case no, not really but all these things you're talking about

01:20:31 ◼   ► All you need to do I think is do enough so that

01:20:36 ◼   ► If something gets through your system, it was clearly done intentionally and like in the in the uber case one of the other

01:20:45 ◼   ► stories about this is that the way they were getting around is, you know, have all these

01:20:49 ◼   ► secret ways of dynamically loading the code and a lot of other stuff, but just to be safe,

01:20:53 ◼   ► don't do that when the GPS detects that you're somewhere within Apple's campus.

01:20:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:20:59 ◼   ► So the geofence, like the Apple campus, and say, you know, when you're inside this perimeter,

01:21:04 ◼   ► don't ever try to do this sneaky thing. Only when you're outside this perimeter,

01:21:07 ◼   ► somewhere else on earth, then do the sneaky thing to call the private API. So in that case,

01:21:11 ◼   ► Like, again, trying to detect, hey, is the program doing that?

01:21:15 ◼   ► Like, in general, no, there's no general purpose, computable,

01:21:19 ◼   ► reasonable time way to figure that out at all, actually.

01:21:25 ◼   ► Because it literally isn't calling the bad API.

01:21:27 ◼   ► And then you have to detect, how can I

01:21:29 ◼   ► tell if it is doing something that

01:21:32 ◼   ► lets it know when it shouldn't do the naughty thing that it's

01:21:34 ◼   ► doing?

01:21:34 ◼   ► But again, you just make the test hard enough

01:21:37 ◼   ► so that if it is doing that, someone can't say,

01:21:39 ◼   ► Oh, we just did that by accident.

01:21:41 ◼   ► That was just a bug, right?

01:21:42 ◼   ► No, I didn't mean to do that at all.

01:21:43 ◼   ► It's so clearly intentional.

01:21:44 ◼   ► Like at the point where you're putting scrambled strings

01:21:47 ◼   ► or assembling symbol names out of a bunch of scrambled data

01:21:50 ◼   ► spread all over your program, right?

01:21:52 ◼   ► Like there's no way you can explain that away

01:21:56 ◼   ► versus say, oh, I just called an Apple API

01:21:58 ◼   ► and the Apple API called a private thing

01:22:00 ◼   ► that accessed some file outside of the sandbox

01:22:01 ◼   ► and it's totally not my fault.

01:22:02 ◼   ► And that happens all the time.

01:22:03 ◼   ► And Apple be like, oh yeah, I can see.

01:22:05 ◼   ► Eventually you can convince Apple,

01:22:08 ◼   ► I was not doing anything intentionally bad.

01:22:09 ◼   ► is just some, you know, something that you didn't realize was actually happening in your

01:22:13 ◼   ► code and I'm doing the right thing and let's just all get through it. So I think that's

01:22:17 ◼   ► all they need to do. That's probably what they're currently doing. And I think that

01:22:21 ◼   ► is, that's probably sufficient.

01:22:23 ◼   ► I was thinking too, like the environment that they have in App Review that automatically

01:22:28 ◼   ► detects whenever this boundary is crossed that, that, you know, your app is calling

01:22:32 ◼   ► something private that it shouldn't be. What if they could deploy that to iPhones and maybe

01:22:38 ◼   ► not to all iPhones because I assume there's some degree of overhead involved here that

01:22:43 ◼   ► maybe would make it too power inefficient or too slow. But what if they deployed it

01:22:47 ◼   ► to say a large group of Apple employees phones? You know like that would probably catch a

01:22:53 ◼   ► lot of things in popular apps, right? So like whatever environment they have to detect these

01:22:58 ◼   ► things in app review, spread that out wider. Maybe they have like a whole bunch of virtual

01:23:03 ◼   ► virtual iPhones in the cloud that simulate using apps

01:23:08 ◼   ► and they track them on those.

01:23:10 ◼   ► They could do all sorts of fun stuff.

01:23:11 ◼   ► - They could just override GPS to get rid of the geo-offensive.

01:23:14 ◼   ► - Sure.

01:23:15 ◼   ► - Once you're running this faked environment,

01:23:17 ◼   ► you just hard code the GPS to be Antarctica or something

01:23:20 ◼   ► and you're all set.

01:23:21 ◼   ► - Right, exactly, and change the IP and everything else.

01:23:24 ◼   ► So anyway, I think expanding that virtual environment

01:23:27 ◼   ► would be one way to do this.

01:23:28 ◼   ► Whether that like tripwire environment,

01:23:32 ◼   ► whether it's just Apple employees

01:23:33 ◼   ► or whether it's simulated things in the cloud

01:23:35 ◼   ► or whether it's both or who knows.

01:23:37 ◼   ► I think they could do a lot there.

01:23:39 ◼   ► The second thing I wanted to talk about

01:23:41 ◼   ► about the Uber thing though,

01:23:41 ◼   ► which I think is probably more interesting,

01:23:44 ◼   ► is the dynamic here of this large app

01:23:48 ◼   ► violates a rule in a pretty big way.

01:23:52 ◼   ► Like obviously, you know, knowing it,

01:23:55 ◼   ► willfully violating it, blocking out Apple's campus area

01:23:59 ◼   ► so they wouldn't see it, evading detection,

01:24:03 ◼   ► obviously this was not like,

01:24:06 ◼   ► ooh, I accidentally called the serial number function,

01:24:08 ◼   ► like no, this was like willful violation

01:24:11 ◼   ► and malicious intent to evade these rules

01:24:16 ◼   ► that are there for very good reasons

01:24:17 ◼   ► in order to invade people's privacy.

01:24:19 ◼   ► It's really bad.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And if I did that in Overcast,

01:24:25 ◼   ► I would be kicked out of the app store immediately

01:24:27 ◼   ► and there would be no recourse.

01:24:30 ◼   ► I would be lucky if I was even told the reason

01:24:32 ◼   ► and that would be it, I'd be gone.

01:24:35 ◼   ► But if Facebook does things like this in their app,

01:24:39 ◼   ► which they do, and they get caught sometimes

01:24:42 ◼   ► and they say it's a bug,

01:24:43 ◼   ► oh sorry, we left the audio session running,

01:24:44 ◼   ► it's a bug that we are running constantly in the background

01:24:47 ◼   ► when we are in use.

01:24:48 ◼   ► Facebook does it all the time.

01:24:51 ◼   ► Twitter has all sorts of awful things

01:24:54 ◼   ► with tracking apps that are installed and everything.

01:24:56 ◼   ► Apple's locked on most of them,

01:24:57 ◼   ► But, and then you have Uber doing crazy crap like this,

01:25:02 ◼   ► and again, and their crazy location stuff,

01:25:04 ◼   ► oh, we need your location all the time now,

01:25:06 ◼   ► and all sorts of crazy stuff.

01:25:08 ◼   ► If a big company breaks a rule,

01:25:10 ◼   ► even in the most brazen, outrageous way like this,

01:25:14 ◼   ► they get a meeting with Tim Cook,

01:25:16 ◼   ► where Tim Cook calmly expresses his disappointment in them.

01:25:19 ◼   ► - Like any good dad would.

01:25:22 ◼   ► - I know, and oh man, I would not want to be in there.

01:25:25 ◼   ► and sternly tells them, you're gonna stop doing this now.

01:25:28 ◼   ► That's certainly a stern warning,

01:25:31 ◼   ► but that's awfully special treatment.

01:25:34 ◼   ► That is being incredibly generous towards this company

01:25:38 ◼   ► that is literally defrauding you.

01:25:40 ◼   ► Like it's like, they're doing really,

01:25:44 ◼   ► there's no way to read this charitably, right?

01:25:49 ◼   ► Why wasn't Uber just kicked out of the app store?

01:25:52 ◼   ► And I think the answer to that is interesting.

01:25:54 ◼   ► So I have some theories.

01:25:55 ◼   ► Obviously there's a question of who needs who more?

01:26:01 ◼   ► And I think the answer is, yeah, okay,

01:26:03 ◼   ► I think Apple could afford to do that.

01:26:05 ◼   ► I think Uber needs Apple more than Apple needs Uber.

01:26:08 ◼   ► But you do have to think about it just for a second.

01:26:10 ◼   ► You know, how many customers would Apple lose by doing that?

01:26:14 ◼   ► It's probably not zero.

01:26:15 ◼   ► So that's something you have to think about, right?

01:26:19 ◼   ► It would be even worse if that was Facebook.

01:26:23 ◼   ► So there are these big companies that Apple actually

01:26:27 ◼   ► doesn't wield complete power over,

01:26:29 ◼   ► that there is some power in the other direction as well.

01:26:32 ◼   ► And Uber is big enough that I think it's one of those.

01:26:35 ◼   ► Facebook is certainly one of those.

01:26:37 ◼   ► Facebook is probably the biggest one, actually,

01:26:39 ◼   ► when you talk about iOS apps, except maybe YouTube

01:26:42 ◼   ► or Google Maps would also be pretty high up there,

01:26:45 ◼   ► but Facebook I think is probably the biggest.

01:26:47 ◼   ► So there's that angle of Apple maybe can't kick out,

01:26:52 ◼   ► they're too big to fail.

01:26:53 ◼   ► They're like too big to kick out, right?

01:26:55 ◼   ► Also, if somebody like Facebook or Uber

01:26:58 ◼   ► got kicked out of the app store,

01:27:00 ◼   ► they'd probably sue Apple.

01:27:01 ◼   ► And what would be the result of that lawsuit?

01:27:04 ◼   ► Would they bring up antitrust?

01:27:06 ◼   ► Would Apple be at risk of maybe having to give up

01:27:10 ◼   ► some of their control over the app store

01:27:12 ◼   ► for antitrust concerns or for other legal concerns?

01:27:15 ◼   ► Like would they be at risk of giving up app approval?

01:27:19 ◼   ► - I don't think Uber would sue Apple.

01:27:22 ◼   ► I don't see anyone suing Apple for this.

01:27:24 ◼   ► Like, you hear people talk about it sometimes,

01:27:27 ◼   ► but there are big problems with that.

01:27:30 ◼   ► First of all, Apple has more money than you.

01:27:32 ◼   ► Like, whoever you is.

01:27:34 ◼   ► Apple has more money than you, right?

01:27:36 ◼   ► So in general, it's good when people have a lot of money,

01:27:39 ◼   ► you wanna sue them and get some of that money,

01:27:41 ◼   ► but it's bad if you're going into a lawsuit

01:27:43 ◼   ► that may turn out to be like this long running thing,

01:27:45 ◼   ► 'cause you will run out of money before Apple does.

01:27:47 ◼   ► And second, the suit for,

01:27:51 ◼   ► The case for antitrust on Apple grows weaker by the day

01:27:54 ◼   ► as Android is like 80% smartphone market share

01:27:56 ◼   ► and growing, you know, worldwide.

01:27:58 ◼   ► It's really tough to make that sell.

01:28:01 ◼   ► And third, the whole App Store agreement,

01:28:04 ◼   ► everything is, I feel like, pretty ironclad

01:28:07 ◼   ► and doesn't leave any room.

01:28:08 ◼   ► And your only hope would be to say,

01:28:09 ◼   ► "Yeah, but it's a special situation

01:28:10 ◼   ► "because Apple has a monopoly on X, Y, and Z."

01:28:12 ◼   ► Like, it's so difficult.

01:28:14 ◼   ► I feel like there's almost no legal recourse.